


Bayou

by Guede



Category: Le Pacte des Loups | Brotherhood of the Wolf (2001), Pirates of the Caribbean (Movies)
Genre: Doppelganger, Grief/Mourning, Hallucinations, Hoodoo, Illnesses, Jealousy, M/M, Murder Mystery, Past Relationship(s), Period Typical Attitudes, Period-Typical Homophobia, Period-Typical Racism, Post-Canon, Racist Language, Rough Sex, Unreliable Narrator, Unrequited Love, Werewolves
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-23
Updated: 2020-10-23
Packaged: 2021-03-09 06:01:41
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 9
Words: 36,419
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27169018
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Guede/pseuds/Guede
Summary: 1766. Fever, social unrest, wolves and murders and politics. There are better times to meet handsome strangers, but Norrington isn't so fortunate.
Relationships: Grégoire de Fronsac/James Norrington, Grégoire de Fronsac/OMC, James Norrington/Jack Sparrow
Kudos: 11





	1. Prologue: Fever Air

**Author's Note:**

> Originally written and posted to LiveJournal in 2005. Follows the general history of 1766 in New Orléans, when the city was turned over to the Spanish amid protests by its mostly French citizenry, but am not sticking strictly to the historical timeline.

Sagging wood houses, fainting in the hot rotting steam that passed for air. Roads that crooked around buildings the way a woman’s finger did, inching a mesmerized customer nearer to her hungry, cold eyes. A bundle of rags flipped over to become a faceless corpse, gorged rats staring out of its eye-sockets, and a rock looming inexplicably in the middle of the road became a dead horse, festering and maggot-infested. The streets were empty aside from the beggars humped on the corners, but screams echoed in every direction and fearful shadows danced behind every window.

James Norrington, only barely of Her Royal Navy, pulled his cloak close to him and ducked his face deep into it in the forlorn hope that somehow the thick fabric would protect him from the sickness ravaging New Orléans. In private, he found himself thinking more and more often that the city itself was a disease, a crouching spill of humanity’s waste edging the bend of the river.

The loud creaking, heavy and slow and erratic, warned him. He hustled himself up against a building—in most of the city, nothing resembling a footpath had been laid besides the roads—just in time to avoid the latest wagon of the dead. As it passed by him, it hit a stone and the whole conveyance rattled dreadfully; a corpse was jolted up only to flop backwards, arm falling towards him and eyes rolling in a mockery of a plea.

“Oui, they like the living still,” snickered the yellow-faced driver, and it was only then that James realized he’d gasped and flinched.

Thankfully, the wagon clattered on and he could resume pretending that he was merely going about his business, away from such foul sights. Unfortunately, there was no blast of sea spray and no leap into the wind awaiting the end of his journey. There was still his ship, but it was chained to the harbor and its men were either senseless with fever or secretly drinking themselves into a similar state. For once, he was returning without the heart to discipline them.

Dark was descending and he found himself moving more slowly, straining to make the crazed shapes and shades into comprehensible objects. James drifted into the center of the road where the light was better; since yellow fever had gripped the city, the traffic after daylight had begun to fail had fallen to nearly nothing. But that was not to say there weren’t still dangers, especially for a foreigner such as himself. The French colonists hated their new Spanish governor and they were still smarting from their losses in the recent war. For that matter, so were the Spanish, but even if they were devoid of any human feeling, they should have seen the wisdom in not provoking—

\--no. There was no point in holding such grudges, James firmly reminded himself. However true or untrue they might be, they would do nothing to help him with his current dilemma. It would only be wasting energy better spent on other endeavors.

And if he were honest with himself—if he were allowed to be honest with himself—he was beginning to suspect his motives for conserving himself did not entirely spring from practicality. He’d been tired and frustrated, and had had good reason to be, but now his fatigue rode his bones and crept into his eyes to blur his sight in ways that he absolutely couldn’t afford to let progress. His skin seemed to drench and burn in alternate versions of hell.

No, that was because it was high summer and he kept himself closely wrapped in his cloak. He was stifling himself to keep from breathing in the foul air. That was _all_.

He was only a few minutes from the dockyards, but James turned away at the last moment. Not because he dreaded delivering the bad news, but because as the only healthy officer left, it fell to him to acquire provisions from the city. The Spanish had been persuaded to that much by the proximity of the British fleet in the Caribbean.

Would that he could send word to them, and find some way of escaping this city, but that was impossible. So James did what he could, tracking down crumbs like the faint shouting he could hear. Some merchant was desperately advertising his foodstuffs, hoping to draw the few able people still wandering the city.

When James arrived at the cracked-pane storefront, he discovered to his surprise that someone had actually beaten him. The man had his back to James, but it was a strong, broad-shouldered back without the shuddering, terrified stoop all the others seemed to have adopted. A thick tail of blond hair hung between his shoulderblades, and when he turned at James’ footsteps, he presented a rough, handsome face and eyes that were still capable of sparking, though they were as tired as James felt. He had been speaking the local Creole patois to the storekeeper, and as he stepped aside to make room for James, he made an extravagant bow: French, and recently arrived. “M’sieur. The plantains are spoken for, but you are free to choose from the rest.”

A marked accent, but of a higher class than James was used to encountering, and very good English. “Thank you.”

He received a raised eyebrow for his curt reply, but the other man kept his peace. James cast a brief glance over the poor selection, unwilling to look too closely at the flaws he knew he’d have to buy. The storekeeper, seeing how much James was considering, eagerly suggested an outrageous sum as if it were only a pittance. And considering the circumstances, it would be, but James still protested. “That’s twice what I’d pay for the highest quality.”

“Sir, you find some other man can serve you, I lower the price. Otherwise, no.” The man grinned and showed a jagged line of broken teeth.

“You find someone to spend that money on, then you’d need it,” the Frenchman suddenly interjected. He was genially smiling, but somehow his lean forward conveyed an air of irresistible force. Then he added a comment in rapid French that had the storekeeper bursting into cackling laughter.

Considering the look James received, it wasn’t hard to determine the nature of that comment. But then the storekeeper offered half-price, and James had to swallow the sourness in his throat. His men needed the food if they were to have any chance of recovering.

When the Frenchman began gathering up James’ purchases, he almost stopped the man, but a sudden, shocking wave of dizziness overtook him and he was too preoccupied with stark terror. By the time he’d calmed himself, they were already yards from the store.

The other man had his hand casually under James’ arm, but was studying him with detached intensity. “So…what would a British captain be doing in New Orléans? If the place is bad for Spaniards, it’s not heaven for you, either.”

“Misfortune.” James shook off the hand and straightened, moving very slowly so he wouldn’t touch off another spell. He felt at his throat and brow, then had to make himself stop before he grew hysterical. “A hurricane forced us into port just as the fever was breaking out, and the governor won’t permit us to leave.”

“I see.” The man handed back some of the food James had bought. “I am Grégoire de Fronsac, also a victim of mischance. Is your ship near?”

After three mental recitations of the calculations used with the octant, James rejected the suggestion of fever. His mind was clear enough, so most likely he was suffering from heat exhaustion. He loosened his cloak and took a step, then in a fit of frustration ripped it completely off. The heavy cloth made a reasonable impromptu carry-all for his purchases. “Commodore James Norrington of the _Interceptor_. It’s about five hundred yards this way…and I should have thanked you sooner. I apologize.”

“Oh, no need.” Grégoire smiled again, and this time his humor was wholly bitter. “I used to be at Court; I understand perfectly.”

“Still, thank you,” James insisted.

With a shrug, the other man acquiesced. Their conversation on the way to the ship revealed that de Fronsac was a naturalist of sorts and had been on the last leg of a tour down the Mississippi when he’d become trapped in New Orléans by the quarantine. He’d survived a yellow fever epidemic some years ago and thus was impatiently biding his time until he was allowed to leave the city. He did know something of medicine, but when pressed, he couldn’t offer much advice besides what James had already been doing: resting his men and plying them with whatever fresh, clean water could be obtained.

“It’d be better if you could get them off the ship and into the air,” Grégoire said. They’d left the food in care of a gaunt-faced Groves who moved like an arthritic old man, and were now walking along the docks. Fronsac had his lodgings nearby, and James felt obliged to walk the man to them, given the help he’d provided. “But I suppose you can’t persuade Governor Ulloa to give up that much to the English dog.”

“No.” A bit stung, James tightened his voice. The shrieking that pervaded the city was slowly growing louder and he hunched his shoulders against its nerve-rasping pitch.

Grégoire shot him a thoughtful look, then softly laughed. “I’ve drawn enough English blood for my country. It’s a name people use, signifying little.”

Somewhere quite close, a scream shuddered into the sky and split James’ answer. He whirled about, hand on his sword, and then he heard the footsteps. Frantic, stumbling, interspersed with crashes as whoever was running collided with obstacles in the way.

Oddly enough, Fronsac hadn’t looked. He had stopped, a peculiar expression on his face, and had cocked his head towards the noise. Then, without a word, he took off for a nearby stack of crates. The man bounded up them in mere seconds and was disappearing over a rooftop before James could even blink.

But there was no time to pay attention to that, because the footsteps had suddenly ended in a flurry and a chilling shriek. James sprang into motion and raced around the corner only to jerk back, flinging up his arm to block the spray of blood. He staggered back and unsheathed his sword, trying to clear his sight.

The body on the ground was what he saw first. Half-shadowed, half-lighted in the eerie dim glow of dusk, it was dressed in the uniform of a Spanish soldier, but its face was nothing but a horrific parallel set of gashes. Dark gleaming stuff was pooling around it.

Second was a whisper moving behind him; James whipped around just in time to see something blurry and white and pointed snapping together in front of him. He slashed up with his sword, but cut no resistance—he’d missed. Whatever it was, it was impossibly fast. And it’d gotten behind him again. He cursed and spun, smacked something fleshy and hard with his elbow and then twisted to barely avoid being crushed.

Then the smell hit—decay, overwhelming decay. Thick and choking and acrid, it knocked him backwards with the force of his coughing. He saw the shadows shift and snapped his sword in a wide arc to the side.

But it’d been a feint; something heavy slammed into his other side and he went down, his sword knocked clattering across the street. Blows stomped at his shoulders and chest, sending deep shocks of pain ripping through him. The white sharp things gnashed at his arm and only pure panic got him yanking that limb away in time. He threw himself up and grabbed behind the growling, found his hands full of coarse rough fur that burned his palms when the thing bucked and roared, but he held on anyway and struggled to keep the snapping from his body.

“Norrington! Laissez—let go and roll left!”

_Let go_ \--were they mad? If he did—

\--then a tremendous heave of the creature made it a moot point, since it flung him into the side of a building. He came down on a pile of debris that was mostly soft, but the parts that weren’t drew blood from his jaw and hands and knees. Shaking his head, James groggily sat up to clearly see for the first time the gigantic wolf that’d been trying to kill it. Or rather, he saw its jaws gaping wide and coming for his throat.

He threw up his arms just as the shot rang out. The wolf jerked, snarled into a thrashing slump that sent it sliding within inches of James. It twitched and gurgled, one yellow eye rolling malevolently up to watch him as he threw himself away. James scrambled to his feet and then promptly collapsed against a doorway, lungs suddenly burning with every pant. His heel stepped on something that rattled; he bent to retrieve his sword and had a difficult time standing up again.

When Fronsac dropped down beside him, he nearly bashed his blade across the other man’s face. “Good God!”

“Are you bitten?” the other man asked. He didn’t wait for an answer, but roughly and rudely patted down James, ignoring the feeble attempts James made to brush him off. Then Fronsac stepped back and stared at the wolf. “Only bruises. Good…that one’s too big.”

“Too…too…” James gasped, wondering if Grégoire had become a little unhinged. It happened occasionally on long sea voyages, so he wouldn’t be surprised if it happened during long trips inland in unsettled country.

But then his skin crawled and he caught his breath, something telling him not to breathe. He looked back at the wolf, which had just whined its last, and then he jabbed his nails into the wall behind him.

The moon was not quite full, but it still threw down plenty of light on the corpse. Enough for James to see that, though hairy, it was decidedly human. “Dear God.”

“You’d better hope he isn’t concerned with this one,” Fronsac snorted, though he seemed rather shaken as well. He tucked his gun back into his belt and started to take James by the arm. “Come—” cocked head again, listening to distant cries in…Spanish “—come on. It wouldn’t be wise to be found here.”

“No…no, it wouldn’t.” James took one step and then he felt something _twist_ deep inside of himself. It hurt.

Then it didn’t, because he was passing out.


	2. Chance Meetings

The man on the bed stirred, then tried to turn over so he could sit up. He failed with a wince and fell heavily onto the mattress, which prompted another grimace of pain.

Grégoire quietly slid Norrington’s sword back in its sheath and set it on a nearby table. “I wouldn’t if I were you. Two dislocated ribs are not something you should take lightly.”

Nevertheless, Norrington insisted on rolling himself into a sitting position. Having succeeded, he spent several moments blinking dazedly at the far wall and breathing in a slow, extremely controlled fashion. He obviously wasn’t a man to be easily dissuaded.

The look he shot Grégoire once he’d come back to himself showed he had some interesting substance beneath all that lace and gold braid. “Thank you for your concern and help, but I have responsibilities elsewhere.”

His voice was as sharp as his blade. And his determination to stand up on his own rivaled that of any farmyard ass, though it was certainly more admirable. If futile—halfway out of bed, Norrington suddenly grabbed at his chest and lost his balance. He flailed for the bedpost, but his hand missed and it was clear he was about to have a painful encounter with the floor.

With a sigh, Grégoire stepped forward and seized the other man’s wrist. He yanked up, ignoring the harsh groan that provoked from Norrington, and then quickly stooped to slip his arms beneath Norrington’s. The other man still hadn’t regained his balance and flopped limply against Grégoire’s chest, breathing hot and heavy so he saturated Grégoire’s cravat with more of the mugginess that was already tormenting the city. After a moment, Norrington put up his hands to clutch at the backs of Grégoire’s shoulders, but once his fingers had dug in, they ceased to have any strength in them. He hung from his fingertips like the last autumn leaf stubbornly dangling from a branch while Grégoire strained to lift the man back onto his feet.

Norrington took a deep breath and shoved his head against Grégoire’s neck in an attempt to brace himself. After a few stumbling tries, he managed to lock his knees and stay upright once Grégoire had set him that way. But when Grégoire started to pull away, Norrington tilted and slumped, grip going iron on Grégoire’s shoulders. Where his face was pressed against Grégoire’s skin, the heat flushed from Norrington to Grégoire.

It was pointless to move, so Grégoire simply stopped trying. He stood in place and let the other man lean against him. “With all due respect, sir—I think your responsibilities elsewhere might have to wait.”

“I am not—I cannot be—” Something very like a sob broke against Grégoire’s collarbone, fraying the edges of Norrington’s near-hysterical voice. But before Grégoire could even begin to think of a proper response, Norrington had clamped down on himself. He calmly turned so the side of his head was pressing into Grégoire’s cheek and lifted his hand. It was shaking so hard the fingertips were a chalk blur. “I have it, don’t I?”

“It would seem so.” Grégoire did his best to modulate his voice into pleasant tones, though he didn’t shy from the truth. It was no longer a likable or a justifiable habit to him. Additionally, he had a hunch that it wouldn’t be welcome to Norrington either.

Norrington tried to stand up one last time, and more through sheer will than anything else, he made it. He slowly slid his arms off of Grégoire and tentatively began to lower them to his sides, but when he began to sway backwards, he hastily jerked them up again. Eventually he tottered to the wall and collapsed against it, swiping at his moist brow. His skin was white as the moon framed in the window behind him, but slicked with sweat so it gleamed like he were made of metal. He couldn’t seem to control the rhythm of his breathing, and his pupils would slowly drift into disorientation before he forced them to focus again.

The room seemed to occupy his attention, for he never looked in the same direction twice. Occasionally a flash of the intelligent, perceptive man he must have been broke through the feverish air. “Where am I?”

“We were closer to my lodgings, so I carried you to them. I sent word to your ship that you’ll be here till morning at least; they sent back that they couldn’t spare men to come, but that they were very grateful.” Grégoire could see what a struggle it was for Norrington to keep his composure, so he turned away and busied himself with pouring some water. There was no point in giving the man the additional burden of an audience. “You’re free to use my bed; there are already two sick men down the hall, so no fear of the landlord tossing you out.”

“And you’ve of course had this before.” When Grégoire handed the cup to him, Norrington briefly focused on Grégoire. Then he went back to scrutinizing his surroundings, stare even more intense because his trembling hands meant he had to hold the cup with both hands. His pride could have been well-described by his shirt—spotted in a few places, ragged at the hem and hanging low enough from his shoulder for the bandages around his chest to be seen—but he made no effort to abandon it. “I do appreciate the offer, but my place is on my ship. After the help you’ve already rendered me, it would be unfair of me to take over your rooms.”

On his fourth swallow, his hand jerked uncontrollably and he spilled the cup. Cursing and red-faced—somehow he was blushing strong enough to cover up his fever-flush—he instinctively tightened his grip. A mistake, since he overcompensated for his shaking fingers. The cup squeezed out of his hold, and he damn well almost fell over trying to snatch it back. The man skidded down the wall in a graceless jumble of elbows and feet and harsh loud breath.

Stubborn English, Grégoire thought as he stooped to catch the cup. He wiped off the rim and picked up the pitcher to refill it, only to catch a queer look in Norrington’s eyes. “I wouldn’t be using the bed anyway. It really would be no trouble. And if you want to be well enough to captain your ship, you’d do better to listen to the man that’s lived through this.”

Norrington accepted the cup. He paused when Grégoire remained squatting and holding the poor bit of pottery, but after a moment his commonsense managed to convince him to let Grégoire help hold it. “Why wouldn’t you be using the bed?”

Then he clamped down on his lip and looked away; Grégoire added ‘prudish’ to the ‘stubborn.’ God alone knew how that people had managed to accomplish so much, considering how nastily they cut the few imaginative adventurers their land threw out. “I’m going out to see if I can find anything about our wolfish acquaintance. Listen, Norrington—the fever is a worse beast than anything else out there because you can’t reason with it. All you can do is rest, drink water, and try to vomit out the window instead of in bed. If your ship has it, then you can’t do anything for them except wait.”

“Then I can wait for them on my own damned deck. I won’t let them feel abandoned,” Norrington retorted. His jaw clicked shut on the last word as if he hadn’t quite meant to let that out, but his eyes didn’t move from Grégoire. Although they did roll a little…and the man was rapidly falling into the fever’s grip. He had commendable determination, but his sense was deteriorating.

Grégoire sat back on his heels and tipped up the cup so Norrington was forced to drink the rest. When the other man was done, Grégoire stood up and dropped off the cup on the table, then reached for his pistols and his coat. “You aren’t a prisoner, so you can do as you please. But I’d remind you that the loup-garou nearly had you, and it won’t be daylight for another five, six hours.”

“Loo-gaa—roo?” Norrington’s pronunciation was execrable. He tugged at his shirt, occasionally stopping to wrap an arm around himself and chew on his lip till the color came back into his cheeks. When he considered himself decent, he carefully used the bedpost to lever himself to his feet.

“The…what do you call it? The werewolf.” And now Grégoire could see Norrington hiding a smile at _his_ pronunciation at that word, so perhaps he should stop underestimating the Englishman. On the other hand, perhaps he should strap the man to the bed to avoid such pitiful sights as Norrington trying to don his tightly-tailored coat with the cracked ribs visibly paining him.

After another moment of watching, Grégoire gave up and took Norrington by the arm. He pulled up one sleeve, then let go of the man so he could straighten the collar. In that position, he could see every flicker that passed over the other man’s face.

“You aren’t surprised that such things exist?” Grégoire asked, keeping his tone casual.

Norrington’s pupils grew wide and dark and blurry, then snapped into pinpoints. He arched an eyebrow and produced a dry, dark smile that was decidedly not in keeping with his earlier attitude. “I wasn’t sick enough to be hallucinating when I saw that.”

“If you had any sense, you’d wish it were a hallucination.” Grégoire stepped back and studied the other man. If he himself had any sense, he’d just let Norrington do as he pleased, and be done with the matter. He’d already done more for the man than he had for some of his own countrymen. “What do you know?”

For once, Norrington’s pride fractured enough for him to betray how out of his depth he was. He had to lean against the wall again, and the fingers of his right hand twisted restlessly around a strip of lace that had torn loose from his cuff. “I know that there are things beyond reason and natural belief in the world. And I know that dead Spanish soldiers in the streets are not good news for French- or Englishmen. Not with Governer Ulloa in the Cabildo.”

Then he tried to raise his hand to Grégoire’s shoulder and promptly lost his balance. His curses this time sounded almost like pleas.

“You’d be doing your duty if you stayed put and got well, and didn’t trouble yourself with this business,” Grégoire grunted, catching the other man. He ducked under Norrington’s arm and wrapped his own around Norrington’s waist, trying not to put too much strain on the man’s ribs. The muffled gasps in his ear proved he wasn’t doing very well. “What kind of captain leaves his ship for some nonsense about a folktale?”

“What kind of naturalist believes in folktales?” Norrington countered. He briefly laid his head on Grégoire’s shoulder, then withdrew. Unsteady, apt to fall any moment, but he was on his own feet and walking under his own power to the door. “Where were you planning to go?”

The man either was a martinet or a hero to his crew, Grégoire decided. He shrugged and ambled after the other man, then overtook Norrington to pin him against the wall. Before the other man could do more than make a few feeble bats, he’d gotten his palms inside Norrington’s coat and flat against the man’s chest. The irregularity was a ridge against his hands, and with a short, sharp shove, he smoothed it out.

Norrington went even whiter than before, proving that that shade did indeed exist. Grégoire ignored how it turned his stomach and rolled up the other man’s shirt while Norrington was too busy clawing at the wall to protest. He made a few adjustments to the bandages and out of habit muttered a prayer that they’d hold. Then he politely pulled down Norrington’s shirt and tucked it back into the other man’s trousers. “If you don’t do anything stupid, that should keep you breathing. Still want to come?”

The paleness of Norrington’s face made his eyes far too bright, but they weren’t bright enough to disguise the resolve behind them. He belatedly pulled his coat tight around him, but he stayed close on Grégoire’s heels. “Where are we going?”

* * *

If the city were burning like Rome—or London some hundred years ago, for that matter—the whores’ alleys would still be the last to go. As empty as the rest of the city was, the prostitution district was still very much alive and thronging with people.

A closer glance showed that it was false life: there was a shrill edge to the laughter and a shadow haunting everyone’s eyes. No…almost everyone’s. Occasionally James would meet a gaze that might be old and tired, or angry, or drunken nearly to stupor, but always it was knowing in a black-humored way that shouldn’t feel so familiar to him. Fronsac had eyes like that, when he wasn’t trying to charm the women. No matter what happened, the French always seemed to be able to make time for that.

“You don’t know any French?”

James startled to attention. Then he had to concentrate on the now-difficult task of putting one foot down before he lifted the other. He felt a hand momentarily touch his elbow, shifting his balance, and almost re-lost his equilibrium by shrugging it off. His chest burned and he struggled to keep it out of his voice. “I know _French_ \--enough to deal with diplomats. What guttural nonsense they speak here, I have no idea.”

Fronsac apparently found James’ irritation amusing. The man turned and made a flourishing bow to a preening blonde, then dipped a hand to her hip. As he swung her around to leave her smile behind him, he leaned in to whisper something. She obligingly giggled, but her eyes were like cool mirrors. She flicked her handkerchief in farewell at them, vaguely in the direction of a decrepit cesspit of a tavern. Shortly thereafter, Fronsac began to guide them that way.

“Some of them are English. You probably should watch your tongue. And maybe we should have traded your uniform for one of my spare coats,” Fronsac warned, though he certainly didn’t sound very serious about it. In fact, he didn’t seem very serious about much of anything, including the women he was so casually touching—a hip there, the edge of a breast there.

“I’ve been here for over three weeks. Everyone knows who I am.” The next words wanted to stick in James’ throat, but he forced them out with his tongue. It was thick and unwieldy and dry no matter how much he swallowed; he wished he could risk a draught of his hipflask, but he was afraid he might tip over if he reached for it. “Everyone knows exactly how much of a threat the British ship is.”

The hands that made her fly all crippled with illness, her sleek form chained in the bay of this pus-leaking sore of a city to rot. And Fronsac could look as surprised as he pleased at James’ vehemence, as care-light as he seemed to be.

Then there were the steps, and so pathetic was James that those two sagging strips of wood were nearly the end of him. He sucked in air past the pain and dragged his body up them, hurrying to get to the top before he pitched forward.

At the last moment, a hand seized his elbow and pulled so he was forced to fall against Fronsac. It guided him into the tavern and, after a few snarls and sharp words that only dimly impinged on his consciousness, got him seated on the first few steps of a narrow, steep ladder leading to some kind of merriment upstairs. Then the hand withdrew, but James grabbed it before it’d entirely left and hung on till his sight had returned.

Fronsac was looking down on him with a mixture of irritation and sympathy. Not pity, James was thankful to see. “I told you to stay in bed. You can barely stand.”

“Is there something to drink?” James croaked. He made an attempt to clear his throat. “Please…”

The other man’s hand jerked up, then down. Shaking his head, Fronsac started for the crowded barroom. “It’ll be piss, but stay there for a moment…”

If Fronsac had slapped him, James honestly couldn’t have defended himself, either physically or verbally. He wasn’t in any shape to be out. He should have accepted the man’s offer, or at the most, made Fronsac take him back to the ship to collapse.

The reason he hadn’t was because he was quite sure he would’ve gone mad. He had been doing nothing for weeks except trudging back and forth between his ship, which was full of his men staring listlessly into space while they burned from inside-out, and the governor’s seat, where he did everything short of licking the damned dago’s boots to no avail. And now there was a new danger roaming the streets of New Orléans, quite capable of inflaming the governor to harmful actions. Fronsac seemed to be an honorable and able man, but he could have been the King himself and James still wouldn’t have felt any better about leaving the resolution of a possible threat to his ship up to the other man.

He didn’t feel well in any case. His skin was on fire and his hands and feet felt as if they were encased in ice. James slowly leaned back against the ladder. He attempted to keep his head up for a little while longer, but it was too heavy and he finally threw that piece of his dignity to the winds. When he could see without the world wavering, he could catch it.

The ladder-step made a poor pillow, but it supported James’ head and it braced his neck, so he ignored the roughness of the wood. Above him, he could hear voices: first they were a blurring chatter, but gradually two of them separated into distinct timbres.

“…nothing but dagoes dying. Bit odd to me.”

“Very welcome to me. Those high-and-mighty bastards come and they stomp their little heels and they expect New Orléans to come running. Well, what’s a treaty to me? It was made in France, not here.”

“As I’m not one for war, I suppose I’d best take my leave, then.”

“We could use you. You and your ship. When we drive the Spaniards from the river, you’d be richly rewarded.”

Pause so freezing that James wished he could dip his face in it. Then: “We’re old acquaintances, so I’ll forgive you that. But I am no man’s hire, and neither is my ship.”

Sudden weight on the ladder made it creak and warp, almost bucking off James. He gritted his teeth against the flaring of his rib-ache, then eased off the rung. Though his intent had been to stand, his legs failed him and he had to catch himself on the side of the ladder so he’d only land on his knees and not completely collapse.

“Someone there? Very, very sorry for disturbing your rest, sirrah, but I’d be needing to get down and—well, this is…interesting.”

James didn’t want to raise his head. Especially with a boot-tip nudging his hand, which was gripping the ladder so hard he thought he could feel his bones merging with the wood. “Sparrow.”

“Commodore! Fancy meeting you here. I’d love to have a good gab with you, find out where you’ve been—thought we lost you ‘round Santo Domingo—but she’s calling and you never want to make a lady wait.” Yes, the slurring babble sounded about right. And the peculiar swishing tinkling noises, and the irregular light stride hastily bouncing off the ladder and away from James, as if he posed any sort of threat. It must have been far darker in the tavern than James had thought—Santo Domingo.

He raked at the steps, careless of how much that jolted his chest, and heaved himself upright. “Sparrow! Jack Sparrow! Get—”

“Who?” Fronsac was standing beside James, helping to hold him up. “Who—Mon Dieu! Arrêt—stop, Norrington! Norrington! James!”

Something slopped onto the floor as James clawed up the other man to stare wildly over Fronsac’s shoulder. The world swung towards him and he gasped, flinched away from it. Then he gave himself a sharp shake—the sudden burst of pain in his ribs made the world settle down.

They were burning candles and torches in the tavern as if such things grew on trees, so there was plenty of light. And Jack Sparrow was not a hard man to spot, even when people crowded a room from wall to wall.

James didn’t see him.

“Are you done?” Fronsac demanded. He sounded snappish, and he muttered in French too fast for James to understand. Its tone, however, was akin enough to his comment to the storekeeper earlier for James to guess the meaning.

“Yes…yes, I’m—I’m sorry. I thought I saw—” And there James stopped, not wanting to explain the reason why he’d been so furious and…then so disappointed. It probably had something to do with familiarity, and Sparrow’s ability to appear anywhere he damned well pleased, but James couldn’t pin down his thoughts long enough to fit them together. “I’m sorry,” he dully repeated, still staring at the room beyond.

* * *

If the Englishman was already entering delirium, then Grégoire might as well knock him on the head, drop him off at his ship, and track down the wolves himself. That was what he should have done in the first place.

Instead, he was propping Norrington up against the wall in a dark corner and slowly trickling watered-down rum into his mouth. It wasn’t quite piss—the barmaid apparently appreciated a man who flirted without clumsily grabbing—but it still wasn’t going to do much. “What happened?”

Norrington swallowed his current mouthful and failed to answer. He was thinking, or trying to think, very hard about something and he was working equally hard on not letting it show. When he wasn’t sick, he probably was very good at that.

“I heard some men talking about Spanish dying—only Spaniards. And then I thought…I saw someone I knew,” he finally said.

Grégoire debated prying the un-abbreviated story out of the man, but then Norrington tugged at the glass in his hand. He suppressed a sigh and poured a little more into the man’s mouth; Norrington’s eyelashes fluttered as he sipped it. “You weren’t imagining that much. That one soldier we saw was the third in as many days; the Governor thought it was only a few drunken malcontents, but now he’s threatening to crack down on the whole city.”

“That explains why he was so curt this afternoon,” Norrington muttered. Then he looked sharply at Grégoire, silently asking for something. “Did…did anyone pass by you when you walked in?”

“No,” Grégoire replied. He watched how his answer wilted the other man.

One of the barmaids came flouncing past and as she went, she smiled at them. “Là, m’sieurs, j’aime ça mais les hommes…tu veux une chambre?”

Laughing, Grégoire kissed her proffered cheek and sent her off with a genial decline of the rest of her offer. Then he turned back to Norrington, who’d recovered remarkably fast. Flinty eyes, raised chin.

“I understood that well enough,” he coldly said.

First he insisted on coming along, then he collapsed so that Grégoire had to nurse him on rum, and now this. Men had killed for lesser reasons. Grégoire resisted the urge to roll his eyes, but did let some of his acerbity filter into his reply. “Well, what do you expect? You can’t seem to stop grabbing for me, you don’t make passes at the women…stop being so insulted and see the advantage. This way, they won’t be pestering us for our money while we talk to the madam upstairs.”

“You…you brought me to a brothel and now you—you’re letting them assume—” Norrington didn’t have the strength to sputter, but he was doing so anyway.

“No, I’m trying to find out more from the people that know the most around here. I suppose you thought oh, Frenchman, always has to be up a woman’s skirts.” Grégoire looked at the last few drops of rum, then wiped off the cup rim and downed it himself. He handed off the glass to yet another barmaid and took James by the arm, pulling him towards the ladder. “If you want to correct their impression, you’ll have to do it yourself. I’m going as far as I will.”

The other man shook off Grégoire’s hand and got onto the ladder himself, though he didn’t have any more strength than that. But when Grégoire reached to steady Norrington, he was soundly rebuffed. “You don’t seem like the kind of man that would dislike that reputation. Unless you—”

“I had a wife, Englishman,” Grégoire snapped, patience at an end. He pushed forward and shoved the other man upwards, whether he wanted to go or not. “She died a year ago, and I’ve lost my taste for women since. And it should be more telling that you’d be quicker to assume sodomy than to believe I might have a gentleman’s manners like yourself.”

He shoved again. It was a short ladder, so that second push sent Norrington awkwardly onto the second floor. Grégoire heard a loud thump and a few pained curses, and then nothing.

Norrington’s ribs, he belatedly remembered. He put his hands on the edge of the second floor and leaped the last two rungs, landing lightly on his feet.

Upstairs was a small open space where they were, surrounded by low narrow crooked hallways with many doors set into them. It was by far not the best brothel Grégoire had ever seen, even accounting for the frontier state of New Orléans, but then, he’d not come for the women or the décor.

At his feet was Norrington, who was painfully drawing himself upright. The man stopped halfway to one knee, hand stealing towards his side.

Grégoire scoffed at himself for never learning, but leaned down anyway to take Norrington about the waist. He helped the other man up and then surreptitiously re-adjusted Norrington’s bandages under the guise of straightening his clothes. All around them, sullen thin girls and narrow-eyed fat ones slunk between broken-down pieces of fine furniture. He called out to one and asked for Madame; after receipt of a coin, she loped down one hallway.

“I apologize. Again.” Norrington clearly wanted to stare at his feet, but nevertheless he made himself meet Grégoire’s eyes. He couldn’t focus on Grégoire for more than five seconds at a time.

“You’re sick,” Grégoire muttered, turning toward a small window. It was set unusually high in the wall and he speculated that perhaps it had been created by a brawl and then set with glass instead of patched. That would probably be cheaper. The glass certainly wasn’t of the best quality—if he wanted to see anything at all, he had to peer through an area the size of a fist that had a gigantic crack running through it.

Behind him, Norrington was shuffling his feet to stay upright and rambling on about how an illness shouldn’t excuse rude behavior. It was disturbing to hear, not so much for the lack of commonsense, but for how Grégoire could tell when the other man dipped deeper into fever: Norrington ceased censoring himself and came out with something beautifully, starkly genuine. Then he would will himself out of it and the tight-laced, circumspect Navy officer would return.

Grégoire was trapped in a social powderkeg and he had a raving Englishman for company. With a very, very small groan, he pressed his forehead against the cool glass and almost closed his eyes.

Then he snapped them open and nearly sent a fist through the window so he could see. Because that _face_ in the road—

\--he wasn’t ill. He knew that. And Sylvia had made sure that Jean-François de Morangias was dead.

“Fronsac?” Norrington asked, touching him on the shoulder.

“M’sieur?” another voice queried, but this one was rich and low with decades of living off the foibles of man and woman. Madame had arrived.


	3. Paying Court

James had never been so grateful for a chair in his entire life. Its legs were of different lengths and so it skewed to the right, but it was far steadier than his own feet were. He was vaguely concerned about the fact that he couldn’t feel any uncomfortable protrusions in the seat despite the small cloud of stuffing leaking out of the cushion, but he thought it might be old habit; on a ship the benches were plain hard wood. Only Spanish fops or pirates had anything more luxurious.

His mind seemed to have forgotten how to hold fast and was leaping from fragment to fragment regardless of its relevance. And Sparrow, though he seemed patched together from a thousand countries, shouldn’t have had a place here. He wasn’t here—James had probably mistaken a similar timbre, had frightened some ordinary ruffian into taking to his heels before Grégoire had come back. If James hadn’t entirely imagined the episode in the first place…and if that was so, even more reason to banish Sparrow from his thoughts. There was no point in dwelling on failure.

“Drink, m’sieur.” A girl, scarcely past the first flush of womanhood, peremptorily handed him a lopsided, filthy mug. She curtly nodded into a short bow and held it.

After a confused moment, James remembered his…well, he could hardly call them manners, but the word would have to do till his mind settled enough to think of the proper one. He fumbled out a coin and shook it into her hand; her eyes flicked to his shaking fingers, and then she slouched away in a sullen whirl of skirts.

Somewhere off to the side, a tittering rose and crested in a rapid, sharp-edged exchange of whispers. Feeling more than a little out-of-place, he gripped the cup with both hands and took a deep draft. At least they’d given him a wide-mouthed mug so he had more to hold onto.

Something was wrong, James thought. Whatever they’d given him tasted horrible, but in a distant, transparent way, as if the foulness were merely a thin overlay on his tongue.

“Drink the rest. It’s the only reason they’re letting you stay here and spoil their business.” Fronsac stalked into the small room, then restlessly paced around the edges while the madam of the brothel helped in an aged, wrinkly skull trailing an old-gold robe.

James flinched and blinked hard. His sight resolved into an old woman with huge sunken black eyes and yellow-brown skin, as if she were a book weathered by time. A more likely explanation was that she was the inevitable offspring of a city where French trappers, Indians and African slaves freely commingled. She certainly looked as if she’d the knowledge of three continents.

The other man finally shrugged off whatever demon had been riding him for the past quarter-hour and stopped, leaning against the wall by James’ chair. He folded his arms across his chest and nodded toward the various objects the old woman was spilling on the floor from a soft leather bag, the only clean thing about her. Beside her, the madam was producing small plates and cups seemingly from her huge, soiled red-silk skirt. “Sea-salt, candle and flint—that’s to keep the spirits at bay once they’re called up. Rum and tobacco, pepper-chicken—gods have simple tastes here,” Fronsac snorted, not quite laughing.

He was surprisingly sober about the whole business, which made James twist to face him. “You—you believe this nonsense will tell you something? Why not—”

“Yes, the authorities will tell us something truthful, just they’ll let you and your ship go on the next tide.” A whip cracked up Grégoire’s voice and jerked his head around to stare at the window. Out the window, though the glass was too smeary to be seen.

James began to retort, but halfway through he lost the exact point and stammered to a stop. He drank some more of whatever they’d given him, which still tasted bad but did tend to linger in his throat, soothing it so he didn’t need to swallow nearly as often. That was good, since it was getting more and more difficult to work up any spit.

“There’d be no point in letting us go now. We couldn’t leave anyway,” he muttered, staring at the brownish liquid.

A loud scratch made him jump and look up, only to meet wide white rolling eyes and a toothless mouth. The old woman barked something at him in a shockingly deep voice, her consonants visibly pumping her throat.

“She…thinks you could use a…a…” Fronsac played with his fingers, brow furrowed “…a grounding. You need to stay on land, or steady yourself—it’s difficult to translate the expression she’s using.”

“I think I understand the gist of it.” The air wavered, first only around the candle-flame she’d just lit, but then the ripples quickly spread outward to dizzy James. He gulped down more of his drink and half-closed his eyes, trying to ignore the low throbbing in his head. “Werewolves and hoodoo do seem to be more compatible than the Spanish and…anyone else.”

Grégoire whuffed through his nose, clearing it—the women were now burning a pinch of something incredibly pungent—and rubbed at it. Beneath his fingers, he was smiling a little, but his former good humor was far from restored. “These houses…they always have someone that knows what science hasn’t understood yet. You can’t have the wrong baby here…you understand?”

“Perfectly.” Perhaps he was ill and not quite in control of himself, but James hadn’t yet lost the power to think. That probably was the worst of it: he could think, and so he could catalogue every single slip he made into helpless delirium.

His sharp tone earned him an even sharper look from Fronsac, though the other man refrained from commenting on that. Instead he chewed on his thumbnail, watching the women work. “What they know is lust and men…it’s not the same as murder, but it might be close enough. I used to be able to—”

Busy draining his mug, James nearly missed the abrupt end. He started to lower the cup to the floor, but leaning only a little over made his vision fade and his head swim with lugubrious drums. So he jerked himself back up and tried to nonchalantly cradle the mug between his knees. They were trembling now as well, and when he willed them to be still, they only shook harder so his nails rattled against the crockery.

Without a word or a look, Fronsac plucked the mug from him and set it on a table barely big enough to hold it.

James felt the inside of his cheeks catch flame. When he pressed his tongue against them, he only succeeded in further drying it out. “You used to what?”

“Nothing. I used to believe in nothing but scientific investigation.” Grégoire retreated into the shadows, listening to the low weird murmuring the old woman was now making. His lips were still moving, but it wasn’t English or any kind of French that James had ever heard.

* * *

God in heaven, but he missed Mani. His old friend would’ve been able to find the trail quietly, simply, without any of this nonsense with hand-passes and offerings. And he most likely would’ve had something to put Norrington to sleep as well. It was disheartening merely looking at the man, what with the sweaty gleaming forehead, the reddened stunned eyes, and the hands that Norrington kept trying to tuck into his sleeves so the shake wouldn’t be so visible.

So why, why didn’t Grégoire ask the madam to slip a little discreetness into Norrington’s drink and then drop him off in a secure bed somewhere? She certainly would’ve been willing, considering how her reticence about discussing “feminine tricks” had completely evaporated when he’d shown her his gold. And she’d already offered them lodgings, though that had been for an entirely different reason.

He absently wondered how much of a cut she took from the thieves who suffocated and robbed the more unaware customers.

The old mambo raised her hand, signaling that she almost had it, and Grégoire nodded. Then he noted the madam sidling around to Norrington’s other side and took a step towards the other man; she betrayed a bit of disappointment, but backed down. While Norrington barely noticed. If Grégoire left him anywhere other than his ship, he’d be rolled and dumped in the swamps before daybreak. And if Grégoire did take the long loop back to the man’s ship, odds were good that Norrington wouldn’t stay on it. He had that kind of determination and curiosity, though he dressed it up in words like “duty.” So there was nothing for it but to coddle the man along and hope he stayed sensible enough to keep out of the way if anything happened.

There was a sound like a gentle rain, and Grégoire looked back just in time to watch the mambo toss a handful of salt across the wooden floor. She did it careful and precise to make an even coating of it. And then she lifted her arms and—spasmed. Her eyes rolled back in her head, her mouth gaped wide and shivering so he could see her tongue flopping about within it like a skewered worm. She was making sounds just on the edge of hearing, shuddering creaking noises that wailed the madam into jerking back against the wall, that yanked up Norrington’s head to stare.

“Good God…” Norrington shook himself and moved his gaze to the wall behind the woman.

The mambo was now swaying from the waist up, strangely loose and limber for her age. Occasionally she would sweep down; Grégoire thought she meant to brush away the salt, but when she raised herself it was still on the floor, albeit with corkscrewing lines and jagged shapes drawn in it. After a moment, he realized she was drawing a map.

She was taking her time about it, and his blood was itching to go out. That face…it didn’t bear thinking on, Grégoire told himself. The glass had been flawed and dirty, the night had been dark, and he’d already had ghosts slipping about his head. It wouldn’t have been a surprise if one had been teased out by the wan moonlight.

“What kind of naturalist are you?” Norrington suddenly asked, voice soft. “To know such things…and you believe in reason as well. The French Court—”

“The French Court needs its butchers, like anyone else. I made them stuffed skins to gasp and gape at in safety.” Grégoire flipped aside his coat and took out his hipflash, then unscrewed the top for a draught. He hadn’t been able to get hold of anything resembling decent in weeks, but then, that probably meant he’d choke on the fine stuff. “The king’s taxi…taxidermist. I don’t suppose you’ve heard of Gévaudan? No—not a surprise, given what happened. There was a werewolf, too. Only it turned out to be some mad noblemen and their pet lion.”

The mambo suddenly lunged at the floor, fingers curved clawlike. They stabbed down and came up with salt flying from their tips. Chest heaving, she collapsed backward and lay limp as a wet rag. But when the madam came forward, the mambo suddenly lifted her head and delivered a glare worthy of a basilisk, if those existed.

They might after all, considering what else did. “I killed the lion, but they all wanted a monster wolf. So they sent me to Africa, and that’s where I found out there really are such things. You?”

Norrington appeared fixated on the old woman, and indeed, the way she’d fallen left one baleful eye trained on him. He didn’t seem to realize his jaw was hanging slightly open between his panting breaths, leaving the too-red flicker of his tongue visible. “I’ve fought the dead. Pirates, that is. They would die and come back to life, and in the moonlight they were nothing but bones…and then they were human again. I hung them, and they didn’t crawl back out of the dirt. I’ve never found out why.”

It neatly explained his seesawing reactions; he’d seen too much to not believe the supernatural was real, but he didn’t understand it in the least. Not even on the prickling, edge-of-sight way Grégoire did, much less the calm deep instinct that Mani and, to a lesser degree, the mambo did.

She rose, sudden and smooth as a snake. Her eyes were cages for shades of malevolent yellow and resigned brown. “Là. You find something there.”

“Another dead soldier, maybe. Greasy Spanish dogs.” The madam spat at the floor, but her deferential demeanor as she lifted the mambo to her feet told a different story.

She knew she wasn’t going out into the night, so she could afford such words. Ignoring her, Grégoire cupped his hand under Norrington’s elbow and hefted him to his feet. The man was a little steadier—it seemed the mambo’s brew had worked a little—but he still kept a heavy grip on Grégoire’s forearm as they made for the door. When they’d drawn abreast of the women, Grégoire slowed a little to slip an extra coin into her hand. The last he saw of that house was her yellow grin shaping around some sound. He hoped it was a blessing.

“She marked a street by the Cabildo,” Norrington muttered. He stumbled and fell heavily against Grégoire, then righted himself. His hand squeezed between them to clutch at his ribs.

“No better place than right up the governor’s asshole. They call it Pirate’s Alley because they drag pirates down that way to the jail.” Grégoire spotted the woman who’d directed them earlier and gave her an abbreviated bow. Then he maneuvered Norrington into a side-alley, which would be slightly more walking but should take less time than fighting through the crowds. Nearly morning and they were still coming for the whores. “And because after one’s pulled through, the other pirates come out of the bushes and go right back to selling their goods.”

He couldn’t see Norrington’s face, but he didn’t need to in order to know the other man was curling his lip in distaste. That was made plain in Norrington’s voice. “The Spanish couldn’t keep order in a henhouse.”

A laugh escaped Grégoire’s mouth, and he had to admit that Norrington wasn’t so bad when he dropped the diplomatic act. “And the pirates?”

The other man suddenly stumbled, forcing Grégoire to grab for his waist. For a moment, it was ducking flailing limbs and palms slipping along rough cloth, feeling the muscles flex frantically beneath them. Then Grégoire caught a hem with his fingertips, walked up his fingers to clench a handful of Norrington’s jacket and heaved the other man up against the wall. If anyone was walking by, it probably looked as if he was trying to rob Norrington—which wasn’t anything unusual in New Orléans, so no one would disturb them.

Norrington slumped so hard against the brick that his teeth grated a bit. He stared back at Grégoire with wide, panicking, pleading eyes and opened his mouth…then snapped his head aside. His breath slowed down as he fought to regain control of himself. The vein in the side of his neck was torn into sharp relief by how he was holding his head, and so every rough beat in it could be seen.

Grégoire shifted to put his elbow under Norrington’s arm to hold up the man, then awkwardly got out his watch, which was miraculously still ticking. He cradled it between his palm and Norrington’s collarbone as he took the man’s pulse.

“How much further?” Norrington finally said. He was starting to slur his words.

“Not far. A few minutes.” Though they’d better find a room once they’d gotten there, because Norrington barely had that much left in him. His pulse jumped one moment, nearly disappeared the next. “There’s a few inns around, and they’ll probably be so happy to see anyone that we’ll be able to get you a room.”

From somewhere, Norrington managed to dredge up an impressive burst of temper. He yanked his head around and attempted to rear up in outrage. “I am not—”

Then his knees gave out and he slammed down his arms on Grégoire’s shoulders barely in time. His sword rattled loudly against the wall and then jabbed Grégoire with the hilt when he caught Norrington.

“You can’t _stand_ ,” Grégoire said, unable to think of any way to make things clearer to the other man.

“I—never—knew what happened with those pirates,” Norrington hotly replied. His nails sunk hard and deep into Grégoire’s back as he tried to lever himself to where he could look Grégoire in the eye. But his feet slipped and he only ended up cracking his chin against Grégoire’s shoulder, which was painful for both of them.

It didn’t deter Norrington in the least; on the contrary, his voice seemed to have absorbed all of his strength. “I never did. My men died trying to kill them, and they just stood up again…but then they didn’t. And I never, ever found out why. Do you know what it’s like trying to explain to a new widow that—that—you can’t, actually. You feed them a lie, and you lie in bed at night wondering.”

And then everything seemed to drain out of Norrington: energy, fire, bones. He sagged in Grégoire’s arms and pressed his face into Grégoire’s neck. It sounded and felt as if Norrington was trying to control his breathing, but couldn’t quite.

“Maybe you’re better off that way,” Grégoire finally said. His opinion came from before Gévaudan; it was rooted in New France with the smallpox-speckled dead of Mani’s tribe, all wrapped in the blankets of the French army. “Sometimes it’s not worth knowing why.”

Norrington’s head went up, but this time it was fever-strength powering him. The whites of his eyes were inflamed and they made the green of his irises glow by contrast. “I think I should be the judge of that.”

“Then if you die, it’s your own doing,” Grégoire snapped. He shoved off the other man and angrily walked away a few yards. Then he stopped and stared at the sky.

Goddamn. More properly, goddam: it was a fitting name for an Englishman, no matter how brave and dauntless and stubborn he was. He actually reminded Grégoire a little bit of Marianne, and a little bit of Jean-François, back before the man had revealed his true nature.

When he came back, Norrington was on his knees and staring at a pool of blood-laced vomit. He had his hands clutched to his breast as if he were praying.

Grégoire felt his stomach sink a little—it was going to be a bad case. Then he brushed aside that thought and concentrated on getting Norrington to his feet. He gave the man a handkerchief so Norrington could wipe his mouth and have something to do while Grégoire more or less carried him the rest of the way.

“I think…” Norrington started to say, tone wrung-out with aching despair.

“Were-leopards walk only at night; I’d wager it’s the same for werewolves. It’s almost dawn. We’ll stop at an inn and rest till evening.” A likely-looking building presented itself and Grégoire pivoted them towards it.

For a moment, he was accompanied only by silence. Then, hesitantly: “Thank you very much, Grégoire.”

“And you can’t even say my name properly,” Grégoire sighed.

* * *

The room was cramped for two men, but it overlooked one end of the infamous alley, so James supposed matters evened out. He could sit on the bed and lean against the windowsill, and from there he could see nearly everything.

They actually weren’t in an inn, but in what had shortly before been a very fine house that had held a large, rich family who’d all fled further inland. Currently there was only a pair of watchmen and a housekeeper, the former of whom were susceptible to Grégoire’s gold and the latter to his charm. Which was certainly impressive, given the woman hadn’t batted an eye at surrendering a room to an obvious fever-victim.

He winced at the words and promptly began to push them away, but stopped himself. They were true, and if he was to have any hope of living through it, he did need to acknowledge the facts. No matter how much it pained him to do so.

“I…” His hand jerked up and he was swallowing some of the soup the housekeeper had brought him. Disgusted with himself, James set the bowl down on the sill and shoved it away.

He tried again. “I…I have…”

“The messenger’s back from your ship.” Grégoire walked in, scrap of paper in hand. There were deep dark bags under his eyes, but otherwise his health stood out starkly against the shuddering, white hand James reached out to him. He slipped the note between James’ fingers and then laid down on the bed, head pressed up against the wall.

The note was nearly illegible, with the tops of letters suddenly scratching for the edge of the paper, but James could still recognize Gillette’s hand. Basically it said his message received and acknowledged, and then it listed the dead.

“What did you tell them?” Though his eyes were closed, Grégoire didn’t sound in the least bit sleepy.

“That something had come up with the Governor that I had to see to. They’ve enough money on-board to buy whatever they need.” James leaned his head against the wall and said a short prayer for his gunner and midshipman. “If they can get anyone to come to them,” he had to add.

The other man moved a shoulder, then pushed himself up and pulled a pistol out of his coat. He shoved it beneath the pillow, throwing a look at James as he did, and then resettled himself on the mattress. “You can probably make arrangements with someone in the alley. I understand a few of the pirates do try to be gentlemen.”

“A few of them shouldn’t be pirates. They’re too—” And James couldn’t even believe he was contemplating Grégoire’s suggestion. Willingly dropping money into the hands of pirates…though they seemed to be doing quite well, to judge by the bustle below. There were fresh vegetables and cuts of meat still red with blood among the items being traded, and his mouth was trying to salivate with the anticipation, though it was so dry that that hurt. “They have to have a way out of here…they can’t have stockpiled everything down there. They’re bringing it in from outside the city.”

“Oh, of course they are. And they guard their ways in and out like they would their ships. Believe me, I’ve tried to buy a guide—they’re too afraid you’ll show their way to the governor. Or to a rival.” Grégoire opened one eye and favored James with a knowing, irritating smile.

For a second, he had another face and black hair and—James blinked and it was gone. “God damn this fever.”

There. He’d admitted it.

James took a deep breath and picked up the bowl. He rewarded himself with a long drink of the thin broth, then resumed looking out the window. Men in patchwork finery flipped torn lace cuffs around to emphasize their vigorous bargaining, or strolled arrogantly from pile to pile of ill-gotten booty. A few women were dispersed throughout the alley, mostly slouching along behind a pirate or hanging teasingly off his shoulder. Once in a while, one would walk by with her own cutlass or long knife belted tight to her waist and her chin up at an angle that reminded James of…what was her name? After the _Pearl_ had outrun them at Santo Domingo, she’d hung over the stern and laughed so loudly he’d heard it standing on his deck, clenching fury and reluctant admiration in his fists and frantically directing the men to clear the fouled sail. Damned Sparrow and his fox crew and his own slippery intelligence…

For that matter, damn him for running before James had even had a chance to explain his business. If he’d just acted like a sensible man and stayed put, James wouldn’t have been searching so far north and they wouldn’t have ended up diving into New Orléans to avoid the hurricane.

Except the sensible reaction for a pirate seeing a commodore of the English Navy was to run, and to run at all costs. 

James quickly finished his soup and edged over to lay his burning brow against the cool glass. Though Grégoire hadn’t said as much, his careful way of handling James after the incident in the alley made it clear he thought James’ fever was quickly advancing. And James thought so as well; his stomach was paining him and he couldn’t even think about seeing blood clots coming from his mouth without shuddering. So he watched the pirates instead, hoping for a distraction.

He got one. At first he didn’t know why his eye was following a certain path over the crowd. Then it gradually dawned on him that the movement was familiar—a kind of liquid hop-skip-dodge that echoed a waterdrop wriggling its way down a windowpane. The movement belonged to a man with a red bandanna and black hair.

Something creaked. Glancing down showed that James had a white-knuckled grip on the sill. He immediately looked up again, terrified that it would be another hallucination and he’d be left facing nothing but his own steady decline.

Jack Sparrow was in the alley. And his head was tilted back so the sun caught his face, and he was staring back.

An exclamation rattled James’ ears. Only a second later, when Grégoire bolted upward and snapped a query did James realize it’d been him making it. He looked at Grégoire, then grabbed the man’s hand and dragged him to the window. “There—do you see a man with a red headscarf and a bone in his hair? It’s black—his hair, and he’s an Oriental look about him—”

“Where?” Grégoire pressed something hard between them when he tried to look out. He cursed and pulled the bowl from James’ slack fingers, then tossed it so it clattered dangerously onto a nearby table. “Where?”

“There—oh, God. My God, what’s happening to my mind—” There wasn’t anyone remotely resembling Sparrow in the alley, and James felt as if he’d just lost his last anchor. “He was—he was—I saw him, damn it!”

Something seized his hands; he fought against it and then tried to slam his head forward, but he missed. Hit air, toppled forward and there wasn’t anything to keep him from falling. The edge of the mattress was not hard, but nevertheless it sent pain shrieking through his chest when he landed on it. He gasped and gasped, but he couldn’t get any air and his ribs were on fire. Somehow he got one arm beneath him and started to push up, but then arms wrapped around him and locked him in place, half-bent over the side of the bed.

The floor seemed to rush up at him and his head snapped back. When it went down again, his mouth was full of coppery bile and he couldn’t breathe. He threw up.

Eventually he had nothing left and he went limp. Someone else wiped off his mouth, pulled him back onto the bed so he could see the expensive porcelain chamberpot he’d just desecrated with red-flecked vomit. James felt a laugh and a scream bubble up inside of him and he pressed his lips together to keep them there.

“Done?” Grégoire asked. He was breathless and his voice ragged on the end of the word.

“I think I’m losing my mind.” James dully plucked at the hands pressed against his ribs and belly. “You’re very good at this.”

The other man laughed for him, exactly as black and hollow as James felt. But then Grégoire moved his hands to squeeze James’, rub warmth back into them. “I’ve had a lot of people grow sick and die on me, commodore. I don’t intend to add another to that score.”

He let go and moved away, pulling out from behind James. Confused, James grabbed for his wrist and tugged him down. “Where are you—”

“Just going to find another bed. I think you’ll need all of this one.” Grégoire jerked at his hand, frowning when James didn’t let go. He leaned closer and took James’ chin between his thumb and index finger, tilting it up so they were eye-to-eye. “Rest, Norrington. It’s the only cure.”

Perhaps for James’ body, but his mind was clearly a different matter. He grabbed Grégoire’s shoulder and punctuated each word with a flex of his fingers. “It’s James. And if you leave, then how am I supposed to tell what’s real and what’s not?”

“If you stay in bed, then you won’t have to make many of those decisions, you damnable man,” Grégoire retorted, tone roughening with his irritation. He started to lift his hand from James’ face and his thumb slipped, drifting across James’ lower lip.

They both froze. It might be another hallucination, James told himself. It probably was. And if it was a hallucination, then he wasn’t really leaning forward to graze the webbing between Grégoire’s thumb and finger with his mouth, and Grégoire’s pupils weren’t really going that wide and dark and hungry.

“Putain de merde,” Grégoire snarled, suddenly throwing off James. He stood up and paced once about the room, then jolted to a stop and flung out his hand at James. “You stupid, stupid ass of an Englishman! You’re—”

Then he stopped. A second later he’d lunged for the window and was staring out it, and a second after that, he’d swung out the door. It crashed against the wall, then bounced back and slowly drifted to half-closed while James watched.


	4. Mirror

Grégoire took the stairs two at a time. When he hit the first floor and pivoted towards the front door, the housekeeper suddenly stepped out from behind a corner. He hastily grabbed her by the hips and swung her about, tossing some quick sweet nonsense in her ear that left her laughing through her blush as he dashed out the door.

It was only a few yards to the alley, and then he was brushing off pickpockets as he pushed his way through the crowd. The residents of New Orléans tended to run a handful of inches shorter than him, no doubt due to the pestilent atmosphere and the irregular availability of food, so searching the alley was a little easier. Nevertheless he’d lost sight of that familiar head between glimpsing it through the window and running out the door, and as more and more time passed by without a reversal of those circumstances, Grégoire felt his anxiety slip painful icy fingers throughout his gut. Perhaps Norrington wasn’t the only one suffering from delirium.

The stupid man had better stay up there. Grégoire only had two eyes, and he was currently taxing both of them to the furthest of their abilities.

“You looking for something?” A slight, dark man in a royal purple coat with the braid half ripped-off sidled up beside him. Mestizo, with what was probably Spanish gold gilding his one front tooth, but he spoke the local French dialect well. “Someone?”

“And if I were, what business would it be of yours?” A light, laughing tone usually eased either sex off-guard. If it didn’t, then it at least gave both sides a façade behind which they could both work.

The other man did something with his shoulders and upper torso that gracefully merged shrug and bow. He spread out his hands as if to prove he had nothing to hide. “Oh, that depends on you, m’sieur. You want, you pay.”

He was slowly herding Grégoire towards a particular side-alley, which was nestled between two tall, narrow houses. A sharp profile distorted the shadow draping it. Then it withdrew to leave only the crisp line of black against the reddish cream of the adobe walls.

Grégoire allowed himself to be led out of the main thoroughfare and just to the mouth of the alley. Then he carefully slowed down, joking with the other man to distract him.

“Spanish still leaving you be?” he wondered, dropping his arm and casually brushing back the side of his coat. He pretended to side-step a spot of filth on the street in order to turn and present his profile to the man.

“Oh, the dagoes would never dare. They know we’re the lifeblood of this place.” Laughing, the pirate reached out and slapped his hand down on Grégoire’s shoulder, merely a good fellow sharing a rare bit of humor in such dark times. Except for the way his hand, masked from view by his flapping coat, darted towards his belt.

At the same time, his partner in the alley rustled from nothing to dark shape. They weren’t bad.

Grégoire gave them a moment to believe they had him, and then he twisted out into the gap he’d left himself, hand snatching the first man’s wrist and bending it around him. He put his knee to the back of the pirate’s thigh and heaved him into his partner, who cursed and dodged and did not quite avoid the fall. They went down and a long knife clattered away from the first pirate, which left Grégoire with plenty of time to draw his sword and pistol. 

He pointed his blade at the two men and his pistol at the exclamation at the alley mouth. “None of your business.”

“Oh, no, I suppose not.” _It was his voice._

Before Grégoire quite realized what he was doing, he’d whirled around to seize the newcomer and shove him up against the wall. At first all he could see was a shaggy mane of silvery-brown hair, which was violently whipping about under the impetus of vigorous swearing and shoving. He used his forearm and elbow to pin the man’s chest and crossed the man’s throat with his sword. The struggling stopped just in time for Grégoire to hear shuffling feet.

He belatedly remembered the other two men and twisted around to point his pistol at where they’d been, but the alley was clear. From the far end came the last echoes of fleeing boots; like most thieves, they were opportunists and they weren’t interested in working harder to bring down prey that could defend itself. Fortunately for Grégoire, since a few moments ago would have been the perfect time to stab him in the back.

“What in God’s name do you think you’re doing?” demanded that eerie voice. Bony knees snapped into Grégoire’s legs and a hand dragged at his sword-arm. “Are you one of those stupid English bastards—”

Grégoire pushed his blade-edge a little closer to the man’s throat, and received still silence in return. Very slowly, he lifted his other hand and used the tip of the pistol to move the hair out of the way. Then he froze. “Jean-François?”

“You…you’re French. But your accent’s so odd…” Staring back at him was the dead Morangias heir.

The muscles in Grégoire’s face clenched together so hard they seemed to weld into a single icy mask, but the muscles in his arm were shaking with the effort of keeping himself from slashing through the man’s throat. It must have shown on his face, because Jean-François’ eyes widened and he clutched at Grégoire’s wrist, trying to pull the sharp blade from his throat. “M’sieur, I was only coming to help. I wasn’t going to rob you, I swear.”

No…Grégoire blinked hard and looked again. The resemblance remained—add the arm and strip away ten years, and this must have been what Jean-François had looked like as a youth. But the behavior was slightly different, the accent was pure Creole, and the terror in the eyes was entirely new.

He stepped back and resheathed his sword while the lookalike bent over, coughing and rubbing tenderly at his neck. “Who are you?” Grégoire snapped. His voice felt about as raw as the other man’s throat must have.

Confused, the man craned his head up to look at Grégoire. His eyes first went to the pistol Grégoire was still holding, then alighted on the single ring adorning Grégoire’s hand. They slowly crawled up Grégoire’s body, assessing and valuing his clothing in a way Morangias never would have bothered with, given his noble blood. “You said yourself,” the man finally muttered, warily straightening. “I’m Jean-François. Jean-François Beaumont.”

“Where are you from? What’s your parentage?” It could be mere coincidence. Mani had told Grégoire stories of men from distant tribes meeting by chance and having the same face, and similar tales circulated in France.

Or it could be that Grégoire was merely having the same problem as those who had only wanted to see a monster wolf and not the master behind it. He would be lying to himself if Gévaudan hadn’t been in his mind since he and Norrington had come across the werewolf.

“I’m from here. Born here. And what would my parentage be to you?” Jean-François retorted. He’d regained some of his breath and apparently some of his spirit as well, even daring to arch a challenging brow at Grégoire. Though when Grégoire took a step forward, the other man instantly flattened himself against the wall. “My mother was a whore, also born here. Grandmother was French, grandfather was…Spanish, maybe.” He raised his chin, proud as any king, and shot a bitter look at Grégoire. “She never told me who my father was, so I wouldn’t know. There. Are you satisfied?”

He did sound as if he’d grown up in the bayous, though the content of his French was a small cut above the majority of the city’s population. There was a slight Spanish tang to his accent as well. But he was at least nineteen. Unless the Comte de Morangias had been much more well-traveled than Grégoire knew of, there was no way he could even be a blood-relation. And Jean-François himself—the brother to Marianne—had been only in his mid-twenties, so even if he had slipped over to America, he couldn’t possibly have fathered a man that old.

A mere trick of nature. Grégoire had catalogued enough of them, so he shouldn’t have been nearly so surprised.

“Thank you for your answers,” he said, holstering his pistol. For a moment, he thought about offering an apology, but as he had no idea how to explain it, he decided against that.

“Thank…you? Thank you?” Jean-François suddenly lunged forward and grabbed Grégoire’s arm so he couldn’t walk away. The man’s eyes were blazing, and his voice crackled as if he meant to spit red-hot coals at Grégoire. “You put a sword to my throat, you demand I tell you all about myself, and then…thank you? Who the hell are you?”

In the summer, the days were long, but night eventually came. The sky was already shading to a deep bruise-blue, and at the end of the alley, Grégoire could see a sliver of moon beginning to show from behind a tall spire. He’d been dipping in and out of the alley all day to no avail; all the pirates knew of the killings, but none of them would do say more than a jeer at the Spanish, or a tale about their grandfather’s meeting with a loup-garou.

“Considering I put a sword to your throat, it would make more sense to leave when I let you.” Perhaps the man wasn’t Morangias himself, but the likeness still disturbed Grégoire. His hand hurt, and it was only after looking down that he’d realized he had a white-knuckled grip on his sword hilt.

Sharp-eyed like any street brat would be, Jean-François noted it as well and sloped off a yard or so. But he still kept pace with Grégoire, nonchalantly twisting and slipping through the thronging traders and robbers to always be that yard away. “I know what men from Burgundy, Lorraine, Alsace sound like. I haven’t heard your accent before.”

“It’s Parisian. I doubt you’ve met better than some country baron who offended the Queen’s lapdog when he finally got to court.” Though Grégoire still had to force his way through the alley, the going was a little easier than before. Most of the pirates seemed to be concluding their last deal for the day, or packing up their unsold goods.

Curious for them to do that, since nighttime would seem even more ideal for their kind of business. Most of their trading during the day had been in items they could plausibly explain away: food, jewelry, mundane things like bolts of cloth. But New Orléans was famed for being a city where anything could be sold, and the Enlightenment, like classical Athens, had been built on the backs of the enslaved. In France they were the serfs, but here…the slave trading should’ve been more visible, yet there wasn’t a trace of it. They had to be selling them somewhere—but it should have been here. No other place in the city was so convenient for the eminent buyers who needed the slaves the most, but who had the least desire to be seen down in the filthier districts.

He emerged from the alley still thinking, and so he failed to prevent Jean-François from seizing his sleeve. The other man drew close as breath, fox-eyes smug and gleaming. “I know. You’re that one asking about the loup-garou. You came to the wrong place for that.”

Grégoire was beginning to agree, but that didn’t mean he would admit it. Especially not to a man whose face made Grégoire want to hack him to pieces right in the street. He jerked his coat free of Jean-François and pushed him aside. “In that case, I should be leaving.”

“No, you should be listening.” The other man ran after him and grabbed his hand, dragging him to a stop. Before Grégoire could say a word, Jean-François had laid two fingers over his mouth. “No, stop—listen to me,” Jean-François whispered, suddenly nothing but raw desperation. “My mother’s still got friends working the pirates—I run errands for them and they give me a bed. I want to get out of this city, but I’ve got no money. I do hear things, though. I hear that the pirates and the loup-garou make good bedmates.”

“Do you.” If Mani were around, he could tell whether the man was ly—Grégoire ripped that thought out by the roots. The last thing he needed to be reminded of was his old friend when he was looking at the face—or almost the face—of his friend’s murderer.

It did fit. The pirates had the most to lose from the new change in government, for the Spanish had a notorious hatred of their kind that wasn’t mitigated in the least by the influx of commerce they brought with them. On the other hand, Grégoire found it difficult to believe that anyone could control the beast he’d encountered. He knew little of the loup-garou, but what he’d seen reminded him more of a mindless mad dog than of the sullen, fiercely intelligent leopard-men of Africa.

“Take me out of here, and I’ll tell you,” Jean-François eagerly said, looking at Grégoire. He was a little shorter than his namesake, but the lankiness of his limbs said he might yet catch up, if given time and space. “You don’t have to take me far. Just out of this goddamned city. I’m sick of it.”

Behind him was the verandah of the house in which Grégoire and Norr—James were lodging. The housekeeper had come out and was leaning over the railing, a puzzled look on her face.

“That’s not surprising,” Grégoire finally said, tugging at his coat. He walked past a crestfallen Jean-François. “Come on.”

When he heard the other man’s sound of surprise, he pivoted back and drew out his pistol at the same time. A quick crack of the butt against the temple, and then he ducked under to sling Jean-François over his shoulder.

“Another guest?” the housekeeper asked, more coy than startled. Then she shrugged. “Ah, well, if you can pay…” she caught the coin Grégoire tossed and dropped it between her breasts “…master’s dead and mistress wants me to hold her great big house till she can afford to come back to it. Pfft. She shouldn’t have cheated me out of my wages.”

* * *

James flopped back on the bed and stared at the ceiling. Then he closed his eyes and tried to go to sleep. But his skin was crawling and he had to hold it onto him so it wouldn’t steal away. Whenever his hand pinned down one spot, another would warm and freeze and then start to worm off of him. It was a constant struggle and he was losing and he panicked, thrashing—

\--“Christ. No.” He slapped his palms against the bed and made himself keep them there until he’d counted to twenty. His skin stayed put.

God, he hated hallucinations. He’d never had them before and he never wanted them again.

There were blankets. He rolled over on his side and pulled at them till he found one edge. Then it was a torturous, slow inching to get beneath them, because every few seconds he had to stop and catch his breath. Sometimes he couldn’t hold onto the sheets because he was so cold and shivering too hard, and sometimes he had to scrabble at them like a rat at a wall in order to peel the sodden fabric off of his skin. But eventually he got under them, and then he wanted to pass out, but his mind insisted on staying awake.

His ribs weren’t hurting quite so badly now, so perhaps the dislocated ones had finally decided to remain where they were supposed to. Or perhaps it was only in comparison with how much his head hurt and how his back seemed to be made of red-hot needles, all pointed inward. He wanted a drink.

He wished Grégoire would come back. James needed to explain something to him. He probably needed to apologize again as well, but that would have to wait, because he wasn’t going to apologize unless he knew exactly what it was for which he was apologizing. If he didn’t, then the words had no meaning and he was insulting both parties.

The window rattled, sending resounding brutal echoes through his skull, and he lashed out. That is, he tried to; his hand fell limply on the sill and searched about for the sash. When he couldn’t find it, he curled on his side and edged his head onto the pillow so he could see what had happened.

Jack Sparrow was perched on the sill. “Like your bloody last name,” James muttered, squeezing his eyes shut. If it wasn’t bad enough that the man had to torment him at sea, now the damnable pirate was invading his delirious fancies as well.

“What’s wrong with it? Makes more sense than ‘Norrington’ does.” The scent of Indies spices and rum and salt drifted down, probably from the pirates in the alley outside. They all seemed to reek of it, as if the better part of their lives wasn’t spent merely hand-to-hand scrounging in the local trash.

Admittedly, it’d looked as if the New Orléans pirates had been doing a fair sight better than the ones James was used to chasing. And the real Jack Sparrow would never had scrounged—he would have danced in and stolen the whole trash heap, along with the forgotten treasure that somehow always managed to waiting for him. “He wouldn’t bother with a pathetic raving fever-victim, either.”

“Who? That…blond gentleman?” Something tickled James’ nose, then lightly stroked his brow.

“No, you. Or you if you were real and actually here. But I lost you at Santo Domingo, and now I’m talking to some version of you the fever’s made up.” The tickling touch came back and James shook it off, then opened his eyes. Now Jack had a foot on the bed and was crouched over him in an impossible position.

He looked worried, actually. Why James would picture Sparrow looking worried, he couldn’t even begin to imagine.

“You’ve looked better.” And Sparrow had lost some of his slur, which was a dead-giveaway that James was fantasizing the entire conversation.

It was funny that he’d irritate himself. “Of course I have,” he muttered, curling deeper into the sheets. “I’ve got yellow fever, like the rest of the city. Why else would I be here and not on my ship, trying to find you?”

The phantom leaned over him again and carefully ran a finger along James’ hairline—he’d left the wig back at Grégoire’s dockside lodgings—then held up that hand, frowning and rubbing his fingers. Jack said something that sounded akin to the bastard French the city-dwellers used. “And why would the good commodore be wanting to do that?”

“If you’d stayed in Santo Domingo, you might have found out.” James shifted restlessly under the sheets, trying to find a cool spot. He swallowed to moisten his dry throat, but only succeeded in inflaming it even further. A cough racked him and it was so painful that he had to snap his teeth into the pillow afterward.

A hand cradled his chin and lifted it. Fingers fluttered along his mouth till he opened it, and then something cool trickled into his lips. He swallowed that and thirstily moaned for more; his tongue flicked out and rasped in a few more droplets.

“God in heaven. You are ill.” Sparrow sounded as if he were being strangled. The hand gently but hastily lowered James’ head back to the pillow. “I thought you were coming for a hanging. Was in Port Royal not too long ago, and the bones of Barbossa’s lot were still rattling a welcome.”

“Well, they didn’t make friends with the governor’s daughter, did they? And her swashbuckling, polite but mule-stubborn husband.” It hurt to laugh, and James knew it would, but he couldn’t help doing so anyway. Because it really was ridiculous. It was right out of a chivalrous romance, and he’d be damned if he ever let anyone know he’d loved the tales of King Arthur and his knights as a boy. “I was supposed to offer you a letter of marque, you brainless parrot. God knows if I’ll live long enough to do it now. God knows…”

And he did not, and he was terrified of that. He’d spent the past three weeks watching his men go this way, spent the last one scrubbing their bloody vomit off the deck because too many hands were down, and he still didn’t know why one man recovered and another didn’t. The strongest seemed to fade so fast, while the weak and the lazy hung onto life with an unbreakable grip.

“You’re not going to die.” Jack grasped James’ hands and squeezed them almost hard enough for James to believe he was really there. He was staring at James the way the old woman in the brothel had, uncannily steady and knowing and _ancient_. Not old.

Then Sparrow grinned, and looked more like James remembered. “Sorry about that, then. I’ll try and less hasty the next time we cross paths. Though you can’t really blame me; you’re enough to make any man shake in his boots.”

“Thank you,” James uncertainly replied. Even when he was making up the man, Sparrow made no sense.

The phantom started to climb out the window and James watched, feeling strangely forlorn about having this hallucination end. It had actually been rather better than he’d expected, considering the violent ravings he’d witnessed over the past month. “All right, I won’t die. At least not by fever…I don’t know about the werewolf, or the Spanish.”

Sparrow stopped, straddling the sill. He cocked his head and curiously looked at James. “Werewolf, did you say?”

“Attacked me. At least—no, I wasn’t sick yet. And Grégoire was there, and he saw it too, so that was real. They’re only killing Spanish, you know. Lousy politics.” James felt a little silly discussing such things with a figment of his imagination, but then, he had no one else to talk to. “Reminded me of Barbossa’s crew, but I never knew what they were. Do you?”

“I’d say I would know. Someday we’ll sit down with a nice big bottle of rum, preferably provided by you, and I’ll tell you all about it. So try and stay in one piece, commodore—else you’ll never know.” Jack paused a moment longer, then whisked out the window. His coat billowed up and then it swept back into a sleek pair of wings.

The parrot did a lazy loop just in front of the window, peppering the glass with drunken curses. Then it dived down out of sight.

The door opened and Grégoire walked in, accompanied by a long pair of legs. He turned about to kick the door shut and James got a good look at the face of the man Grégoire was carrying. Lean with a long nose, but handsome in an angular way. Strange hair…it was thick and wavy, and its color shaded from brown to silver and back as the light playing on it changed.

“How are you feeling?” Grégoire deposited his burden on the floor beside the bed. While he was bent over, he grabbed the chamberpot, put on the lid, and then took it outside. He had a brief conversation with someone in the hall before coming back inside, hands full of rope and strips of cloth.

“I’m seeing things, but they’re…friendly enough. Could you please…” James rolled all the way over and flopped a hand in the direction of the water pitcher.

The other man propped him up against the headboard and put a glass of water in his hands, then retreated with a speed that wasn’t quite necessary. Though Grégoire was smiling, his eyes were watching James the way a swordsman did his opponent, looking for clues as to the next move.

He knelt down and busied himself with tying the unconscious man’s wrists to the leg of the mattress. First he wrapped each wrist with a rag, and then he bound the rope over it, as if he didn’t want to hurt the man.

“Who is he?” If James timed his sips right, he could drink in between shivers and not spill the water.

“Jean-François de—Jean-François Beaumont. A local boy. He says he knows why there are werewolves in the city.” Grégoire was censoring his words, and not very well. He finished with Beaumont’s wrists and absently began to turn the man over so he was in a more comfortable position, then stopped himself. After a sharp shake of the head, he picked up another cloth strip and gagged the man.

James raised an eyebrow. Beaumont’s upturned face grew a long muzzle and snapped open its eyes to show a malicious glare; when James jerked back, he splashed a quarter of the water in the glass over his hands and chest and the bed. He closed his eyes and told himself very calmly that Grégoire wouldn’t drag in a werewolf. Then he looked again.

He saw two men and nearly sighed in relief. But that would hurt his throat, so he made himself keep it in. “If he can help us, then why are you—”

“—because I’m not sure he can. He—” With his head down, Grégoire’s mutterings were too muffled to be deciphered. Then his shoulders heaved with a deep breath and he looked up at James. His face was tired, not surprisingly; he hadn’t had much more sleep than a short nap earlier in the day, and he’d been constantly active. “Anyway, it’s nearly dusk. The Governor’s keeping his soldiers close to the Cabildo because he thinks the wolves are after him, so I don’t have far to look. If it turns out that Jean-François does know something, then we’ll go from there. But in the meantime, I want him where I don’t have to search for him.”

“So you’re tying him to my bed.” James drank the rest of the water, then pointedly set the glass on the bedside table. At least, he tried to.

Just before the glass would’ve hit the floor and shattered, Grégoire scooped it from the air. He sat down on the edge of the bed and refilled it. “You’ve got my pistol. You can use that even if you can’t hold your sword steady. Do you know how much that woman is charging for just this room?”

“You’re going out again. Why? You can see most of the Cabildo from the house. Those soldiers are probably so nervous that they’d shoot you by mistake.” Why was the man so wary around him? It had something to do with what had happened before James’ vision, but he couldn’t quite remember. His memory seemed to drift in spots, some pieces disappearing and then resurfacing after he’d forgotten why he needed them.

Grégoire looked as if he didn’t know whether to laugh or lose his temper. He started to reply, then cut off in favor of leaning across James to close the window. As he did, he brushed against James’ hands and made them jerk, splashing more water.

“Damn it,” James snarled, yanking the glass to his chest. He glowered at the water and dared it to slop over the rim.

His shoulder shivered, but unlike the fever-shudders, this one was small and…warm, not chilly. He looked over and saw Grégoire slowly drawing the back of his hand along the edge of his shirt, which was wet with sweat and the spilled water.

The other man leaned forward, then stopped when his mouth was beside James’ cheek. His hand turned to slip fingertips just beneath James’ open collar. “You’re ill and I’m disenchanted. I can’t think of an unhealthier start.”

James swallowed hard and licked at his parched lips. His next breath came a bit short. “I was almost married, but I lost out to a…he suits her better. And now I’m dreaming of pirates.”

“Without hanging?” An answer apparently wasn’t expected, because Grégoire continued talking. He stroked his fingers up and down, just inside the hem, and then circled them around James’ neck. “I liked my wife’s brother. But he wasn’t what he seemed, and I killed him…I loved her and she died wrapped around my son.”

His thumb remained beneath James’ chin, which it lifted so their lips could meet.

It was slow and warm and lazy, a sweet way of soothing the ache in James’ throat. It was a jumble of past and present, real and not-real, memories of things that never were shading into sensations he knew belonged elsewhere, but that he couldn’t remember _where_ elsewhere was. Elizabeth’s delicate lips, finally free of their gauzy veil barrier…some frantic fumble in the hold, bracing against the pitch of the ship and biting lips so the moans weren’t heard because sodomy caught meant the noose…arms catching him back from the spew of his failing body…the burning sweetness of rum. He closed his eyes in the hopes that it would sort itself out, but it only confused him further.

Something stirred beside the bed. Grégoire jerked away, for once lacking his composure. He stared at James for a long moment, frustration and longing and a similar incomprehension in his eyes. Then he smiled to himself, mocking something, and turned to look at the floor.


	5. Backtrail

By now James was able to sense the oncoming of a particularly bad bout. He gulped down the last traces of his water, unheeding of how much he spilled, and then handed off the glass to Grégoire. His hands were already jerking so much he couldn’t make them still no matter how hard he pressed them against the blankets, and he was praying that the slow leak of acid into the back of his throat didn’t signal yet another vomiting spell. If he couldn’t manage to keep down something, then he might yet fight off the fever but lack the strength for recovery.

Someone knocked at the door and Grégoire went to answer it. James laid down, curling himself high on the bed so he could watch the man waking on the floor. Beaumont was dressed like a common roustabout from the streets, but he woke like a thief: slow, not moving very much, and regaining alertness in a heartbeat. The only way James could tell the man was lifting his head was by the slight shift of his hair. His eyes were slivers of nerves darting about the room, finally landing on James and then Grégoire, who had returned with an armful of things. Among them were James’ wig, a few bags leaking strange scents so pungent they made James’ eyes water, and a large, thin leather-bound case.

“I had a man bring our things, since it doesn’t seem like we’ll be leaving soon.” Grégoire deposited most of his burden on a nearby armchair, but retained the case. He set that aside on the table beside the bed with unusual care before methodically going through the rest. “Seems he believed my warning that I’ve been collecting cursed Indian artifacts. Damn. I’ll have to pay him the whole fee now.”

Once Beaumont had spotted Grégoire, his caution had fallen away and he’d sat up with an indignant sound. Now he yanked at his bound hands—the bed shook and James hastily suppressed the urge to vomit—and threw back his head to level a mortally offended look at Grégoire. He yanked at the gag till it was loose enough for some muffled speech and barked something in the gutter-French of New Orléans, to which Grégoire made no reply except to turn his back on Beaumont. The color rapidly mounted in Beaumont’s cheeks.

The housekeeper poked her head and hand past the door, beaming when she saw Grégoire. In return he gave her an absent smile and a few coins, into which she bit in a matter-of-fact way. He chuckled and tossed her another coin that she dropped into the front of her dress as she withdrew.

“What on earth did you tell her?” James asked. The sweat on his forehead and neck was drying and leaving behind a sharp chill. He shivered and pulled up the blankets as best he could.

“Not much. Though she told me quite a bit about her master and mistress.” Shaking his head, Grégoire resumed rummaging through his belongings. He extricated an oil-cloth-wrapped bundle, which he unrolled to briefly show two sheathed long knives. They quickly disappeared up his sleeves and poked snake-heads out of his collar.

James rolled his eyes; if the fever-dreams were always that patently ridiculous, he wouldn’t have a thing to fear.

“Fear the woman scorned?” Beaumont had dragged out the remainder of the gag, and now he contemptuously returned their stares. “What? English sailors come here, even if their flag does not.” 

He had a heavy accent, but his English was surprisingly good. There was no way he’d picked it up from the odd deserter or trapper that would have made it to this outpost of the French frontier. It seemed that the same thought had struck Grégoire, for the man was now watching Beaumont with an intense, wary gaze.

If the air in the room was chilly, the look in Beaumont’s eyes when he jerked his head towards James was positively glacial. He shot off another long string of Creole French, most of which sounded highly insulting and which probably had to do with whatever he assumed Grégoire’s relationship to James was. Grégoire’s response was a careless shrug and a short, curt comment that James _thought_ might translate to a jeer about envy. It was rather unlike Grégoire, who up until now had been extraordinarily polite and tactful, considering the circumstances.

Something silver flashed, drawing James’ eye to Grégoire’s wrist. But the other man had pulled down his sleeve before anything more could be seen. He raised an eyebrow at James and pointed his chin at Beaumont, who had apparently been rendered speechless by fury. “If he’s right, they won’t come anywhere near this side of the Cabildo. Even pirates don’t foul their eating-places.”

“Of course I’m right. And what do I have in return? This?” Beaumont yanked at his hands so hard he moved the bed. 

Caught off-guard, James was flung backwards. His stomach went the other way and suddenly the world wanted to wring him from inside-out. He scrabbled desperately for the edge of the mattress, twice mistaking a fold in the sheets for it before finding the real one, and then hung his head over the side. A white round blur violently clattered down before him just as the first thick clotted mouthful of vomit forced itself through his lips.

He had hardly anything left in his belly to empty out, so it didn’t take long. What landed in the bowl was a disturbing rusty shade that sickened him to look at; he knew he should be checking for fresh blood instead of dried clots, but a single dry heave convinced him that between courage and prudence, the latter was the better choice.

“Yellow fever? And you’re leaving me with a dead man?”

“He is very much alive and I expect to return to see him that way.” There was a hand on James’ back. It rubbed from between his shoulderblades to the incurve of his spine while he tried to work up the strength and motivation to lean backwards. “If you’ve never been out of the city, then you should have nothing to worry about.”

“Oh, I had the damned fever. But he’s throwing up red bile. He’s done for.”

Grégoire muttered something about backwoods superstitions and quack medical theories. “He’s throwing up clots. If that were bright red, then I’d order him a coffin.”

A handkerchief, worn and frayed at the corners, was passed to James. Despite its raggedness, he could still tell that it had originally been an expensive piece of cloth and he was a little loathe to waste it on himself. But he wasn’t in any condition to reach for a rag, so he hesitantly began to dab at his mouth with it.

“Funny what you say about superstition. You believe those are real loup-garoux running around, don’t you? Not just rabid dogs or madmen?” It sounded as if Beaumont was coming closer. “Why do you care if there’s dagoes dying? Is it because you’re afraid they’ll blame your English friend?”

“Anyone with the slightest particle of sense would know neither I nor any of my crew is in any shape to climb out of bed, much less kill someone,” James muttered, wishing he were in a position to lift his head and glare as well. He took a last swipe at his mouth before letting Grégoire pull him back onto the mattress and take away the handkerchief. “Reprisals against men like you are far more likely.”

Something small and hard pressed against his lips—a vial, perhaps, though it was strangely cold and had the wrong texture. The stuff in it registered as smoky and revolting, but the communication between James’ senses and mind seemed to have stretched very, very thin. Trying to send a message from one to the other was probably much like passing on news by shouting from hilltop to hilltop.

The water that followed afterward was nevertheless very welcome. James had the vague impression he was embarrassing himself by loudly sucking it down, but as he’d temporarily forgotten what he should do in such a situation, he did nothing.

“I’m trying to help—mmph! Mmmph!” Beaumont’s strident, skull-paining voice was abruptly, wonderfully cut off. It was replaced by the scuffling of heels and angry grunts, but those were much more tolerable.

Grégoire snapped some Creole at Beaumont, which temporarily stilled the newly-gagged man, though the air around him positively vibrated with wounded rage. Then he bent over James, backs of fingers lightly brushing away the sweat-matted hair from James’ forehead. “I’ll have Annette bring up some soup for you.”

As he left, his long coat swung around and up to transform him into a billowing sail. The corners of James’ eyes stung and he had to blink twice to banish the hurt.

* * *

New Orléans at night could be a wild wolf-girl, a debauched princess, a hungry old hag or a cringing ghost, depending on the district and the season. Arguably Grégoire’s stay in the city had shown him the whole spectrum of her personality, but he had not yet seen any mood remotely resembling tonight’s.

Once the streets had started to empty, they had done so with great rapidity. Women and children whisked away before the sun had even touched the horizon. Men lingered longer, but they did so in groups of at least four, huddled around a lantern or a crude torch. Their faces were gaunt and sallow to begin with, and in the yellow-orange light they resembled incarnations of pestilence come to roost.

At last there was only Grégoire, stationed at the window of a small nearly chapel, and the shadowed figures of the Spanish guard on the Cabildo. He sat himself on the sill and braced a leg against the opposite side, letting his other foot dangle down.

The chapel was otherwise empty, and from the looks of things had been so for a while: the flowers were either withered or pulpy brown rot, and the dust on the pews was thick enough for him to be able to write readable words in it. He’d borrowed a Bible from one to help pass the time, but he had to give up on that long before the light grew too dim. Someone had gone through and underlined every passage about plagues and disease, and they’d also scribbled unintelligible commentary over the pages of Revelations. The frantic spikes and the shuddering trail at the end of every word said enough without the content needing to be understood.

Deep mournful bells tolled the hours once, twice, three times as Grégoire waited. The city grew black as hell, the only light a few straggling pinpricks in the canopy of the sky. Or perhaps they were nicks in the sooty underside of a pot lid, which held in all the heat and mugginess so the humans beneath would stew in their own foulness.

Grégoire lifted his hand to tug open his shirt-collar and found his fingers twitching. He irritably smacked them against the wall, then stifled a curse at the pain in his knuckles.

Perhaps ten minutes later, he caught himself glancing towards the house in which James and Jean-François were, which was only visible as a thin vertical slice of a corner. This time, he pressed his head to the cool windowpane in the hopes that it would chill his thoughts into sensible form.

Norrington appeared to have been a man in his prime before he’d caught the fever, and even now he was shockingly self-aware, so he shouldn’t lack for strength or will to fight off the disease. And he wasn’t alone in the house; the housekeeper had promised to check on him every hour, and given how she’d admired his face, she probably would keep that promise. If brute force was needed, there were the two watchmen, who were some sort of kin to her.

Though Grégoire doubted they’d ever need to leave their morose vigil playing cards in the kitchen; Jean-François struck him as an intelligent, if dramatic, man and life would have taught him better than to strike out of spite. There was no profit in it.

For that matter, there was barely a man in it—he really couldn’t be over twenty. He cursed and snarled like his self-proclaimed background, but there was a strange…not innocence, but an incomprehension of long-term consequences. His insults rose from the passion and the knowledge of the street, but he hadn’t yet been made weary or bitter by it.

He could be acting for someone, though in that case Grégoire was finding it increasingly improbable that Jean-François necessarily knew into what he was trying to draw Grégoire. Possibly a cat’s-paw. Or possibly he was acting alone—Grégoire hadn’t seen anyone trailing them, else he wouldn’t have risked taking Jean-François into the house. In which case he could be trying to lie his way into a softer berth, or he could be telling the truth.

The more Grégoire thought on it, the more he failed to _think_ and saw instead: a man on a horse, hunter’s red and silver moon. And then he had to cut himself off and stare hard at the soldiers shivering in the hot night.

It was only a face. It wasn’t the manners or the accent or the air.

Perhaps it was the guilt. Not for, may God continue to keep her and her son, Marianne, though the mere thought of her made an ache press wistfully against the inside of Grégoire’s chest. He had loved her, did still love her, but she was dead and he, despite his grief, was not. Mani had once told Grégoire people were to him like wolves were to Mani, and he’d cheerfully agreed with his friend. He still did agree, though his reasons for doing so were far more studied and somber.

Then perhaps it was for Mani, and for all that Mani had been: a failure to see all that Grégoire should have until it was far too late. He was not an altruist by any measure, but he did pride himself on his ability to discern patterns in the world where others merely saw untamed wilderness. Yes, the loup-garou existed, and so did many other strange things, but they were knowable and could be observed and studied and understood. They were not excluded from reason, and reason was the only real bulwark against horror and hysteria and all the other dark shades of humanity.

Grégoire found the corners of his mouth dragging upward into a humorless smile. Somehow he thought he’d had this conversation before, in one form or the other.

Across the road, a slight-bodied silhouette stole from building to building. It seemed to move with some purpose, always circling within a few yards of the soldiers.

And it’d been spotted. One soldier suddenly yelped and pointed his musket; his comrades quickly took up the cry and they went from trembling frightened line to yelling half-insane mob within seconds. They weren’t going to leave behind anything even remotely useful once they’d gotten started.

Grégoire snatched up his hat and jammed it down on his head as he raced out. His knee glanced off some woodwork protrusion as he did and he muffled a curse in his upturned coat-collar. It was not bad enough to make him limp, but it did pain him as he dodged through alleys and twisted past heaps of debris.

The soldiers were now shooting, but it had been some time since the age of the conquistador and they had no order. Their bullets knocked out window-panes, rattled shutters and triggered at least one scream, but none of them hit the shadow, which had leapt for the rooftops and was now dancing madly from house to house. A likely pile of crates and a sagging eave presented itself; Grégoire grabbed for the edge, hooked his fingertips over it and hauled himself onto the tiles.

He cut across one roof and jumped for the next before he’d quite gotten a look at the gap. His feet hit the opposite side just as his mind told him that he’d never been able to jump that far. Thanking ignorance, Grégoire dropped low to the tiles and continued forward. He was nearly upon the other man now, and as the Spanish soldiers seemed to have lost track of the intruder, Grégoire didn’t need to worry so much about drawing the attention of their muskets toward himself.

The other man stopped to catch his breath and finally noticed Grégoire. He jerked up and started to scramble away, but by then Grégoire was close enough to grab a wrist and draw a knife. He had intended to merely tap the blade-point against the man’s shoulder, but instead his knife loudly grated against a sword.

“Bonne nuit,” said the other man. He macerated French much less than James did. “Don’t suppose I could convince you to talk this over a few mugs of rum?”

Part of being a member of the aristocracy was a reflexive evaluation of certain details of dress, which had long preceded any interest of Grégoire in naturalist studies. He didn’t have to think about the fact of the man’s hilt; he merely knew. “You have Norrington’s sword!”

“Norrington?” The man suddenly snapped to attention, less grinning apology and much more…menacing pirate. Pirate. Tattered coat, kohl-rimmed eyes and outlandish jewelry. Pirate.

Grégoire pushed himself back, struggling for footing on the loose tiles, and reached for his other knife. “Why do you—”

A scream. A long, shrill, raw shriek of violently-dying terror. Both Grégoire and the other man froze, staring at each other. Somewhere nearby, a fusillade of shots rang out; the Spanish had finally remembered they were an infantry unit, not a panicked horde.

“I’m thinking we were both waiting for that,” the other man finally said. He cocked his entire body, teeth gleaming white and gold and eyes coldly watching Grégoire. “Ain’t in my interest to have dead Spanish, either.”

“You’ll have to do better than that to persuade me. The pirates would have the most to gain from a lack of government here.” More screams filtered up and Grégoire’s feet were twitching with his need to go investigate, but he didn’t dare turn his back on this man. The pirate had…no, he didn’t have James’ sword. The tassel on it was longer and the wrist-guard was a slightly different shape. But if it wasn’t made by the same man, then Grégoire would give up on the world and enter a monastery. “And what’s your involvement with Norrington?”

The pirate’s grin flickered sour, but the next burst of shouting made him flinch as well. He lowered his sword a handspan. “We’d have the most to lose from a fleet scouring these waters, too. And I could ask you the same about the good commodore.”

Then, before Grégoire could even reply, the pirate stepped backward off the roof and dropped out of sight. Grégoire rushed to the edge and peeked over, but he saw nothing. He hadn’t even heard the thud of the man landing on the ground…

…yelling. The Spanish seemed to be moving away, but they were still audibly present; Grégoire swore at the pirate and hurried towards the commotion of which he could make some use.

* * *

“Grégoire’s not here to hold the bowl for me, so if you keep moving the bed, I’ll probably have to vomit on your head.” James weakly pushed his aching head further beneath the pillow, trying to drown out the scraping of Beaumont’s nails on the bed-post. The noise was like an iron file taken to his eardrums. If he closed his eyes and tried to block it out, he heard a loud, nauseating sloshing that he suspected was the soup Annette had dribbled down his throat.

The other man paused for a moment. One blissful moment before he resumed trying to untie himself.

Somehow James had to make the man stop moving the bed. He willed away enough of the headache to think about why Beaumont had paused. “Grégoire de Fronsac. That’s his name.”

Beaumont ceased attacking his bonds and sat up, intently looking at James. After a moment, he scooted close to the bed to rest his chin on it. His eyebrows jumped and his shoulders wriggled as he tried to communicate something without hands or mouth.

James blinked. It hurt, as his eyes had apparently decided to swell up and press against the sockets caging them.

The skeleton in front of him rattled a frustrated tattoo on the floor with its bony heels. Though the gag blocked its yellow gaping grin from sight, James’ imagination was perfectly capable of filling in the missing details. He gasped and flung himself backward, then promptly fell forward onto the mattress, ears ringing and eyes searing with pain. Grinding the heels of his hands against his eyelids did little to relieve the excruciating pressure, but even that small degree of relief was palpable to him.

The bed rattled and he jerked up his head, staring wildly about the room. Eventually his eyes settled on Beaumont, who was making even more frantic gestures. The man repeatedly rubbed his mouth against his shoulder…the gag? But where was the skeleton?

Why was there supposed to be a skeleton, for that matter? There shouldn’t be.

The thought stuck in James’ head: _there shouldn’t be_.

He snapped his hands together and dug his nails into his skin, using that pain to work past the other one, the one that was slowly and softly dragging his reason into fetid depths. Then he took a deep breath and edged a hand towards Beaumont, who was now watching him slantwise, the way one would a dog that might be mad. But the other man held still long enough for James to scrape his shaking fingers in between the cloth and Beaumont’s cheek.

Once the rag was out, Beaumont yawned wide and unashamed as a cat, then worked his jaws a bit as if they were stiff. “You seeing things yet?”

“I don’t know as if that’s any of your business,” James muttered, feeling vestiges of his old self creep back. For the moment, it seemed that the fever had retreated.

“You are.” Beaumont was carelessly knowing and unconcerned with the situation, putting up a knee for his chin so he could insouciantly stare at James. It was most likely how he operated under normal circumstances.

James ventured a quick glance further over the bed and noted that Beaumont was restlessly twisting and untwisting his fingers in the ropes. So not so far from the earlier panic, after all.

He had that much in common with James, who had managed to dredge up enough memories that _felt_ genuine to convince himself the skeletons were long gone. On the other hand, they were also enough to tell him why the skeletons were important. “And I keep seeing Sparrow…”

Beaumont twitched. “Who are you?” he asked, all studied nonchalance.

“I assumed you knew, given your comments to Grégoire.” It was a shot in the dark, but James was pleased to see it hit home in the other man’s eyes. No, he hadn’t really understood any of their conversation, but now Beaumont couldn’t be quite so sure of that. Hopefully it would make him less likely to drop confidential information in Creole French; if Grégoire continued to leave so abruptly, it was doubtful whether James would ever have the time to press him for explanations. “James Norrington, commodore in the British Navy. If you require a formal introduction.”

His voice cracked on the last word, too parched to bear the weight of the sound. When he attempted to lift a hand towards the water pitcher, he could only move it a few inches before he had to stop and rest. The lassitude that had taken him was not merely confined to his body; his mind was temporarily free of delusions, only to lack the strength to carry out any extended line of thought.

Grégoire, James reminded himself. Werewolves. Pirates. He would not be left with burials and no answer to the widows and orphans—and to his cabin mirror—this time. Thinking took less effort than moving, and it kept him from fretting about being away from his ship. “I take it you’re acquainted with Sparrow.”

“Any pirate whose name is worth telling comes to New Orléans sooner or later.” Beaumont gave James the hungry, laughing smile of the beast that is just beyond the rifle’s range and who knows it. He raised himself on his knees, peering closely at James, and then sat back. “Your tongue’s flaming red. Like a whore’s dress.”

More like fire, considering how much it burned. Staying rational took up a good deal of James’ attention, so it was surprisingly easy to ignore Beaumont’s tries at baiting him. A small advantage and not one bought at a price he’d care to pay again, but at the moment James had to settle for what he had. “Your city’s not particularly kind to newcomers. Perhaps that would be why Grégoire is so loathe to believe you.”

Personally, James had the vague notion that a better explanation for Grégoire’s reaction involved the strange way he’d spoken of his wife’s brother, but he preferred not to speculate on that idea. It sounded peculiar enough to him now, and he would not make uncharitable assumptions about a man who’d offered so much help…and comfort.

The use of Grégoire’s first name seemed to irk Beaumont. “Why would I lie? What’s there for me in that? Telling the truth’s more dangerous, especially when it’s pirates who’d like the secret kept.”

From outside drifted the sounds of a low, urgent conversation that crested into distinguishable French just beneath James’ window, then faded away. The discussion hadn’t ended; it had shifted location. 

James tried to move towards the window to see, but he’d barely gone a foot before he had to lie down and curl around himself. He was panting and every breath raked heated knives down his throat.

“You need water,” Beaumont muttered. “Lots of it; that’s why most die. They shrivel up and lose blood.”

The housekeeper, James thought. He should call for her. And he attempted to, but the only sound he could produce was a ghastly croaking, which exacerbated the hurt in his throat. He sank to the mattress and desperately stared at the water pitcher, less than a yard away but for all intents and purposes as far from James as Port Royal was.

“I could…”

James wearily looked at Beaumont, expecting to see cold calculation. But surprisingly enough, the other man seemed to have genuine sympathy in his eyes that was not quite masked by his hesitant use of leverage. “If I called, she’d think I’d gotten loose and panic. I could get you the glass like I am,” Beaumont finished saying, again cocking his head so he was watching James through wisps of hair. The effect was something like a fox hiding behind a grass tuft. “But to get the pitcher, I’d need my hands.”

“I don’t have a knife, and that’s the only way I could free you.” Holding up a hand made James’ point clear enough. He put it back down, paused, and then heaved himself around to fully face the table. After a little rest, he’d try to move forward.

“I hate fever summers. It happens every year, you know. People dying like flies, and you feel like you’re getting it all over again even though you lived.” Speaking with unexpected heat, Beaumont wrenched himself around and wove his feet between the table legs. He shot a defensive, resigned look at James as he grabbed for the bedframe. “Don’t throw up on me.”

Then he hooked his knees around one leg, his ankles around another and slowly dragged the table towards James. After a few inches, Beaumont stopped to worm beneath the table and come out the other side, where he resumed pushing till James could stretch out and touch the top.

The pitcher was only half-full, so it hadn’t slopped any water on the table. On the other hand, it therefore also wasn’t possible for James to simply duck down and lap up water. He struggled up on his elbows and put one hand through the handle. The other one he used to try and steady the pitcher as he tilted it.

He angled it too steeply and his trembling hands made water splash into his nose, where it burned out snorts and stifled sneezes from him. But enough water flowed down his throat for his thirst to fade out that annoyance and make him eagerly gulp at it. He had to will himself to slow down so as not to make himself sick.

When his throat felt like a part of himself again and not a rebel trying to free itself, James carefully tipped the pitcher back onto the table. His chin was wet, and dribbles had dampened his shirt, but he found that he couldn’t quite care about such small details. He wiped off his chin and began to thank Beaumont, only to find the other man engrossed in studying the thin leather case Grégoire had left on the table. Apparently it’d fallen to the floor.

James bent down and managed to scoop it up. Before his unreliable hands could fail him, he dropped it onto the mattress. “Thank you for the help. And I’d thank you to leave others’ possessions alone…”

Beaumont had worked open the fastening for it, but hadn’t had the time to open the case. In trying to shut it again, James slid his fingers beneath one half; his hand spasmed and he accidentally flipped it open. Papers rustled and fluttered, some falling half-out of the…portfolio.

“Quoi? Laissez-moi…” Undeterred by James’ reprimand, the other man had twisted about and stretched himself over the edge of the mattress to see. Then he fell silent.

Another reprimand was due, but James failed to give it because he was entranced. Page after page of fine sketching and colored pencil-work was contained within the case: strangely-garbed people that he thought might be the Indians of North American, a few animals he recognized and many that he didn’t, a magnificent drawing of a Spanish galleon and of a sloop charging a reef. He knew he should shuffle them all together and shove them back in their portfolio, but James instead found himself pulling out more pages for a look.

Further in the back were a series of studies; several drawings devoted to one particular person appeared in quick succession before the subject changed. There were a few caricatures of noblemen embarrassing themselves—Beaumont muffled his snickers in the edge of the mattress—but the treatment soon turned…almost melancholy. Some pages of a handsome, well-built North American Indian that seemed to have been very close to Grégoire. Two of a slim youth with a naïve if good-natured air, and then a long string of portraits of a beautiful young woman, which seemed to have been done over at least a year. The first was a profile of her aiming a rifle, defiant with a touch of frail innocence—much like Elizabeth before her marriage. Then the sketches showed her adventuring against an exotic backdrop, but with an air of a broken back about her. She stared out of the paper as if she were just about to ask to be cradled within the viewer’s arms.

The last sketch was quite different, all jagged angry lines that somehow formed a more peaceful, serene picture than that produced by any of the more delicately-drawn pieces.

“She’s dead,” Beaumont whispered. He saw James’ puzzled look and pointed with his chin. “See? The way the shawl’s folded around her? Living women don’t hold it like that; the Indians wrap their dead like that just before they burn them.”

Marianne the wife, then. James quickly turned over the sheet, swearing to himself that the next would be the last he looked at before he put them all away.

It certainly was. He heard a gasp beside him as if it were coming from a long, long way through a thick mist. His eyes scanned the portrait once, twice, and then he started to face the only explanation for it. But as he did, his gaze crossed the date.

He had to look at that twice as well, and then point it out to Beaumont. The other man promptly turned white, which proved that James was not suffering another hallucination. The sketch was indeed of Beaumont, or someone extremely like him, and it was dated three years ago.


	6. Will o' the Wisp

When Grégoire finally arrived, the soldiers were milling about the square, pointing their guns in every direction and rolling the whites of their eyes towards every shadow. He swung well clear of them and slipped off the roof into a small side-street to see what he could make of their conversation.

They were ringed in a loose semi-circle with the ends slightly flared, like a blooming flower. A less picturesque but more relevant description was that they looked as if they’d surrounded something and then had it burst through the line. Several soldiers were being carried away on stretchers, heads limply lolling over the edge of the poles. Their appearance didn’t bode well for their survival, but so much the better from Grégoire’s point-of-view. If any of their injuries were directly inflicted by the werewolf, then they’d survive to become their nemesis, and that would unnecessarily complicate matters.

He softly stepped towards the end of the alley, taking advantage of the thick coating of ivy on the building corner, and scanned the square. It was one of the few paved plazas in the city and its stone had a dull glimmer in the moonlight. Grégoire thought he might have spotted a handful of shinier, wetter spots, but it was difficult to see past the soldiers constantly tramping back and forth over it.

An officer finally called for a retreat and Grégoire blessed the man without thinking. He started to retract it, then shrugged and let it stand: Spain might not be his favorite country, but not even her men deserved to have werewolves stalking their nights.

After the square had emptied, Grégoire cautiously walked out to examine the stones. The Spanish had scuffled and blurred nearly all of the possible clues, spreading bloodstains and dusting over the plaza with the black-powder discharge of their muskets, but a very few traces had escaped their attention. He could reconstruct the direction of the initial charge and identify the place where the soldiers and the wolf had come to grips, and he could tell that the wolf had been badly wounded before it had escaped. But following its trail led him only to a dead-end alley a few blocks away.

The roof, Grégoire suddenly realized. Then he remembered the pirate, and so when he climbed up, he did so with pistol in one hand.

But the roofs were empty as far as he could see, and when he listened to the night, he heard nothing out of the ordinary. The roof tiles were mainly reddish-brown, so in the dark they would be about the same color as blood and therefore any splashes would be virtually undetectable unless Grégoire crawled about feeling for wetness. Perhaps if Mani had been around…but he wasn’t and Grégoire had never been as good as his friend at tracking.

From the looks of things, the wolf was already long gone. According to local legend, the loup-garou had incredible stamina and strength, and Grégoire saw no reason yet to disbelieve that.

He stood on the roof, thinking for a moment, and then he retraced his steps back to the square. Though he couldn’t trail the wolf itself, he might be able to discover from whence it had come.

* * *

“What—who—he only met me today!” Beaumont exclaimed, voice as shaky as James’ hands were. He turned huge, anxious eyes on James. “Who is that?”

“Here…” James began to point at the note scrawled in the corner, but he glimpsed the defensiveness and embarrassment in Beaumont’s eyes and hastily corrected himself. Fortunately for the both of them, it consisted of only a name and a date, so James’ French wasn’t unduly taxed. “It says Jean-François de Moran—Morangias. 1763.”

A thought occurred to James as he struggled with that name; he flipped back through the papers till he’d found one of Grégoire’s wife in a similar pose. Then he laid it side-by-side with the other sketch.

Small strangled sounds leaked out of Beaumont’s throat, and his fingers were gripping the ropes so hard his nails were white. He forgot to be embarrassed about his illiteracy. “What does that one say?”

“Marianne de Fronsac. 1764.” Frowning, James eased out the very first sketch of her and checked it. For a moment, he thought about not reading it aloud for Beaumont, who was beginning to sway as if he felt faint.

The other man looked at him, and James saw that it wasn’t necessary for him to state the obvious. “Brother and sister?”

“That would explain a good deal,” James muttered, shuffling the sketches into the case and resetting it on the table. A drop fell onto the back of his hand and he blinked at it, momentarily confused. Then he touched his forehead, found it dripping and swiped at it with his cuff. It came away very wet and oddly blurry.

No, that was his sight, which was beginning to swim with the crashing of the tide.

“Shooting. They’re shooting at something.” The fox beside the bed suddenly sat straight up and pricked its silvery-grey ears.

James swore and ripped at his collar, trying to release all the heat that had collected unnoticed within him and that now seemed intent on pressing the sanity out of his mind. He stared at the wavering world till it resolved into the bedroom and the man he remembered. Then he dragged himself over to the window and rested his arms against the window. His skin grazed the glass and he shuddered at how cold it felt, then surged up to the glass in an attempt to soak away some of the overwhelming mugginess.

“Is there anything?” Beaumont called.

With an effort, James forced his eyelids open and scanned the streets as far as he could see. His vision blurred in stripes and he nearly panicked before he realized it was not an oncoming attack, but instead was only the sweat from his brow trickling down the window. “No. It’s happening on the far side.”

The other man spat a few choice curses, some of which were English, and jerked at the bed. “Oh, sorry. But that man is an idiot. He goes out there and they’ll shoot him because they’re dagoes and they can’t see in the dark. And he won’t listen to me!”

The lassitude was back and it was accompanied by a strong sense of dizziness. James slowly let himself slide down the window till he was lying half-curled on the bed. He knew he should also pull up the sheets, but the joints in his hands were aching badly from the continual tremors running through them. In a moment he’d cover himself. Yes, in a moment.

“Norrington? Norrington?”

Beaumont simply wouldn’t stop making noise. Damnable man. And James’ ship was rotting in the bay and crying out for him, and sparrows were pecking at his mind, and Grégoire was somewhere James could not see. He wished he could have gone out with the other man. He wished he simply knew what was going on; it was difficult to fight off the delusions when he didn’t already know what was the reality.

“Norrington!” The bed leaped and shook and groaned like a ship cracking herself on a reef. Then there was a long, peculiar silence, with only Beaumont’s breathing audible. It was very loud and it overlapped, as if he were panting hard.

“I’m not dead,” James rasped, burrowing himself as deeply as he could into the rumpled sheets. His head was beginning to hurt and he thought he could feel his eyes expanding in their rigid sockets, but he was determined to not to throw up again. He would master his stomach, and he would keep his blood where it was supposed to be. He’d promised, he thought. A promise to a phantom, though that was about the least unusual aspect of the past two days. “You remind him of his brother-in-law. I think that’s what Morangias was.”

Clothes rustling. Boots scuffing the floor. “Oh?”

Beaumont sounded very odd. Like he was drunk, perhaps. Or like he was a pirate. They always seemed to phrase things oddly. “His dead brother-in-law. He killed him. Something about werewolves in France, and…I can’t remember,” James added.

“That’s all right. That’s enough to make even for the water.” Now the other man’s voice was more like itself. And it was quite close, but that was probably the fever. The bed was also rocking gently and there was a breeze flowing over the top of James, as if he were back on the deck of his ship.

Then the breeze was gone and a hand was there, lying against his forehead. “Clever boy,” said the distorted Beaumont. “Maybe he’ll make something of himself. Lift your head, commodore. The housekeeper’s a bit more alert than I figured on, and I’ve only a moment to give you this. Sloshed in a bit of rum to cut the taste, so drink up…just like any sailor beneath that uniform, aren’t you? Good.”

* * *

Unsurprisingly enough, the trail led Grégoire down to the waterfront. It went by ways so crooked and devious that he began to wonder whether he was, in fact, following a true trail. Animals rarely bothered with secrecy, and only for short periods of time, such as when approaching prey. Granted, it wasn’t a mere wolf he was tracking, but he found it difficult to believe that the beast could be wickedly intelligent at one moment and a mindless hunger on four paws the next.

The lion of Gévaudan had been allowed to roam free, but it had first been thoroughly beaten into slavery. Once it was free, it no longer had any conception of freedom and so it hadn’t realized it could run from its master. Perhaps the loup-garoux of New Orléans were not quite so tame; the inexplicable detours and wrecking of empty alleys could very well be due to a beast fighting against a leash. Grégoire started looking for human traces.

He finally found one in the freshly-battered doorframe of a shack so near the sea he could hear the waves. A beautifully clear imprint of a gigantic chainlink had been slammed into the wood, so deep its edges gleamed in the weak light.

That briefly puzzled Grégoire, but then he checked the sky and found to his shock that he’d been out nearly all night. A scarlet sun was melting upwards into the sullen clouds, bright in a way that did not dazzle the eyes, but instead slowly warmed them to prickling pain. He squinted, then rubbed at his right eye and stifled a yawn.

James hopefully was long asleep, as the man sorely needed it. The slight soreness dragging at the corners of Grégoire’s eyes said he needed it as well, but he could do without it for a little longer. If the werewolf had managed to whip one of its holding chains into the door, then it must have still been well-rested and capable of cunning, and its place of origin must be very near.

Grégoire took a moment to retie his tail of hair, which had been dangerously near to slipping into an unruly mass, before he headed out to the dockyards. He was on the very edge of the city here, right where it and the bay and the delta all met in a sensuous, fetid merging, as if New Orléans was nothing more than an overblown growth on the Louisiana shoreline. In the distance were the masts of several sloops, one wallowing Spanish hull, and the tall spikes of what Grégoire presumed had to be James’ ship. It still raised its masts with pride, but the sails were all furled and that lent a bare, incomplete air to the sight.

Shaking his head, Grégoire banished such sentimental nonsense from his mind. There was no point in dwelling on reminders of the voyage to Africa, when the wind had brushed healthy roses into Marianne’s cheeks and when he’d believed everything would at last be well. Neither was there a point in dwelling on the nonsense that perpetually surrounded his thoughts of James. If the man died, then all Grégoire would have gained was another candle to light in the church. If he lived, then he’d return to his ship and Grégoire would return to shipping specimens to his successor as the king’s taxidermist. Norrington would marry someone and either wax fat in paradise or die in battle, depending on how the political pendulums swung; Grégoire intended to follow the Gulf Coast and he fully expected to succumb to some unpredictable wilderness threat and die alone.

“Not that I would like to,” he snorted. But the possibility of any change in that fate seemed too unlikely to bear thinking on.

People were beginning to stir, either to tend to the morning’s chores or to drag themselves home from another desperate dive into alcohol. He did his best to look casual as he hurried his pace, wanting to reach the end of the trail before anyone accidentally obliterated part of it.

The few that were venturing out generally kept their heads down and their mouths shut except for the odd moan or curse, so when the sound of raised, vociferous voices reached Grégoire’s ears, he immediately snapped to attention. They seemed to be clustering in the next street over, so he searched about until he found a road running crosswise to it. Crates were bountiful around this area; he borrowed one in order to get onto the roof of the nearest building without making an undue amount of noise.

Here no one was rich enough to afford tiles, which meant that the roof was wood, saturated with the moist air and constant soft rot that pervaded the city. Its planks didn’t creak, but instead sighed and whispered their complaints as Grégoire’s feet pressured them. By the time he’d reached the side closest to the voices, he had decided he would rather have creaking. The noise reminded him too much of the way Sylvia had run her hands over a row of cards in order to softly turn them over.

“…lost him,” said a low, barnacled voice in regular Creole dialect. “He took a shot in the chest after taking the fifth down, and it hit a lung, I think.”

“Lost him? _Lost_ him? He’s a goddamned loup-garou!” The second voice had a tang of Irish intermixed with its gutter-French.

There was a quick scuffle of boots on dirt, and then the meaningful _snick_ of a hilt being clicked out of the scabbard. “Meanin’ that he’s dead,” drawled the first voice. “I know where the fucking body is.”

“What about the soldiers? Any bit? I don’t want fucking dago rougarou or loup lalou or whatever you call them running around here. Have enough trouble handling your local ones while they’re in town.” Although the first speaker had definitely moved back, he hadn’t reduced his truculence.

“Couple bitten, but they’re all dead. Nice thing about those Spanish; they don’t see any problem in making our women serve them. Think we breed soft girls that can barely think enough to mix up herbs and soup, let alone poison.” Venom suddenly crested in the man’s voice. “Arrogant bastards.”

The first speaker muttered something about pots and kettles and name-calling, which made Grégoire cover a grin. A foreigner drifted north, something like Norrington’s situation but without his quick realization that New Orléans acted as a world unto itself. “I’m sure you’re happy, but now we need another if we’re to get Ulloa. And fast. He’s a hard man to pry from his hole; practically had to tell him we’d netted an angel for his mistress so he’d promise to sneak out tomorrow night.”

“Rougarou I can get,” the second speaker placidly answered. “You worry about getting me the governor’s head and earning your pay.”

The real conversation ended there, though the two men continued to exchange thinly-veiled insults for a few more minutes. Grégoire wouldn’t have laid down much money on the first pirate—for they had to be that, even if the Irish one dressed finer than the usual run of them—ever touching his payment. From what he’d seen during his stay, the local rivermen alone were a savage, clever pack that could easily outmaneuver the buccaneer grown soft on easy merchant prey. And governors, like nearly all government officials, were merely businessmen with a rank.

Grégoire counted off an extra thirty seconds from the time he could no longer hear their footsteps. Then he leaned over the side of the roof and carefully memorized every inch of the alley that he could see. When he believed that he could recognize the place at night, he got up and climbed down the opposite side of the roof, only to meet Jean-François waiting for him.

The other man was leaning against the wall, arms crossed over his chest so the raw red marks on his wrists stuck out from his sleeves. His calm flickered when a hilt dropped into Grégoire’s hand, but otherwise Jean-François echoed the menacing self-possession of his namesake.

“How did you get here?” Grégoire demanded, quickly stepping into the clear. If he had to draw his blade completely out of his sleeve, he wanted plenty of room. “What happened to Norrington and the housekeeper?”

“Last I saw, she was chasing birds out of the chimney. And he’s sleeping.” Jean-François raised both his hands to flash clean palms at Grégoire. “I didn’t lay a finger on him.”

“Good.” Still watching him, Grégoire circled around so he had a clear exit out of the alley. He listened for a moment, trying to determine if anyone was in earshot. It didn’t seem so, but nevertheless it wasn’t wise to linger here.

A wrist-flick sent his blade back into its sheath. He waited for the telltale slouch to seep into Jean-François’ posture—little more than a youth, truly, but any sign of maturity unnerved Grégoire—then seized the other man by the wrist and swiftly whirled him out into the street. Before Jean-François could do much more than yelp, Grégoire had locked their arms together and was hustling them down the road, keeping Jean-François’ hand trapped between them. “How did you get here?”

“Because I told you, I knew about them. The Irish one—Roberts—fancies one of the girls at the brothel where I bed down. He talks all the time when he’s drunk, and that’s—let go, damn it.” Twisting and jerking, Jean-François made enough of a commotion that some people began casting them odd looks. He didn’t seem to notice, or if he did, he was too busy hissing at Grégoire to care. “I am not your dead brother-in-law, or whatever—”

It wasn’t till Jean-François was half-slumped over his knees, stunned from being flung into an alley and against a solid adobe wall, that Grégoire came back to himself. He stopped and stared at the other man, hands icy and itching to snap necks while his face was flushed and hot.

Very slowly, Jean-François stood up. But he kept himself close to the wall, edging back when Grégoire took a step forward. He was chewing on his lip and his gaze couldn’t stay in one place, darting around Grégoire for a way out. “So that’s it,” he muttered, not sounding certain at all.

One step brought Grégoire within an inch of the other man. He slammed his hands against Jean-François’ shoulders and forced them back against the wall, which in turn brought Jean-François’ head sharply up. Jean-François sucked in a breath, but Grégoire pushed his face in and spoke first. “Listen to me. You think you know a good deal, but in fact you know very little. Stick to that and leave the rest alone.”

“Why? So you can tie me to another bed?” Though Jean-François’ voice was sharp, his eyes said that he was terrified. But he didn’t stop talking. “Maybe I don’t know, but I think I should. You’re thinking I’m some evil from your past—I only met you yesterday! You don’t know anything when it comes to me.”

He was right. And Grégoire would admit it if he were a fair and righteous man, but he was not that and had never pretended to be that. All he had ever tried to do was to see the truth, and from there it went where it willed. In the case of Mani, it had gone to the grave. Same for Marianne, though her death had been delayed by two years.

“What do you think you are?” Jean-François railed, shoving at Grégoire’s chest. “A god? Ruler of this plague-city? The only damned man in this city that can do anything?”

“It would seem that I’m the only one who _cares_ to do anything, since you had to talk to me.” Grégoire began to let go, intending to turn around and walk back to the house, but a fist came flying at his face. He intercepted it and bent that hand back to the wall, then deflected Jean-François’ knee just in time. That joint he slammed down before throwing his weight against the other man, who was slightly taller but far slighter in build.

Despite his physical disadvantage, Jean-François did not cease struggling. He snarled and snapped at Grégoire, managing a few telling blows even without actually freeing himself. “Really? What do I care about the dagoes? I told you, I want passage out of here. Maybe I liked your face and offered what you wanted. Maybe if someone else had come along I would’ve offered something _different_.” His next buck against Grégoire abruptly turned fluid, flat lean belly sliding down Grégoire’s front. The corners of his lips drew back in a razor sneer. “Maybe if I’d known about the commodore, _Grégoire_.” Voice became a low slithering sigh. “You know it’d be like making love to a corpse, trying something with someone who’s got the fever?”

They were too close for Grégoire to slap him or punch him. But the smile on Jean-François’ face was lewd and taunting and there were entirely too many levels of recognition here. Something had to be done.

“If you have any sense, you will stop talking,” Grégoire rasped, grinding both of Jean-François’ wrists against the wall.

“If you had any sense, you wouldn’t be nursing a goddamn Englishman just on the off-chance that you can get a fuck out of it.” Jean-François bucked again, and this time he undulated his groin against Grégoire’s prick in a practiced manner. Then he fell back against the wall, looking puzzled and angry. “What? You like the broken things? Am I too healthy for you?”

It wasn’t a kiss but a snarl, and accordingly it drew blood. Grégoire was not trying to pleasure the other man; his intent was very much in the opposite direction. He wanted to rip off Jean-François’ lips and so he sank his teeth into them, mangled them in between smashing back any sound the other man made.

When the other man gave, he instantly pushed forward. When he felt Jean-François bending, mouth opening and knees wrenching against and fingers fluttering uselessly against his grip, Grégoire wanted to feel the man break. He sucked the blood from Jean-François’ lips and then he let his mouth go gentle, so gentle that the other man started to believe and started to relax. Then he made his mouth hard and hungry again, needled his tongue-tip into the breaks he’d made in Jean-François’ lips. He ate the whimpers and the whines and the prayers while he pulled both of Jean-François’ hands into one of his, while he yanked down their trousers.

A small voice reminded him of the public moving about just a few yards away, of the ideals he’d used to hold, of the quiet scarred horror in Thomas’ eyes when he’d told Grégoire what had become of Marianne at her own brother’s hands. He didn’t want to listen to it, but it was insistent and so he spun them deeper into the alley, turned Jean-François sideways against him and wrapped his fingers around the man’s risen prick. It didn’t take long or much to coax a generous amount of white stickiness onto Grégoire’s hand.

He had had to lift his mouth when he’d moved them and so Jean-François could speak. And he did, not in the broken quiet tone of his moaning but in a harsh, jagged voice which fury matched Grégoire’s own. “Keeps you the gentleman—for Norrington. Did—did that other—did Morangias do that for you when you were—courting his sister?”

“You stupid little whore.” Grégoire rubbed together his fingers, barely coating them, and then shoved his hand between Jean-François’ legs. They reflexively came together, but a sharp pinch at a thigh and the man jerked them apart, gasping. “You whore, you think for once you can buy and not sell—I’ve seen your betters. I’ve fucked your betters, and you’re not the horseshit on their shoes.”

Then he had Jean-François up against the wall and his fingers were squeezing to get inside the man’s ass because it was tight, and no, Jean-François wasn’t _that_ kind streetwalker, but he still had the reflexes common to all whores. He closed his eyes and he fought past the hurt to spread his knees, and very soon Grégoire fingers had plenty of room. So it was Grégoire’s prick instead and he wasn’t thinking at all about why it was lifting for this loudmouthed brat. He was chewing on Jean-François’ throat to cut his thoughts into pieces and he was pushing himself into the other man to put distance between himself and the pieces, and then he was hurling himself into the climax because he knew he would fall through and they would burn away.

For a moment, they had to slump together against the wall like lovers. But then Grégoire had the strength to push himself away and ignore Jean-François’ tottering near-fall to the ground. He cleaned himself off with a rag and pitched it into the far recesses of the alley. “You don’t even know enough to ask the right questions.”

His voice was oddly calm. In comparison, Jean-François’ temper had dissolved into badly trembling hands that rubbed a cloth up his thighs and almost shoved it into his balls before he flung it away. He took several moments longer than Grégoire to do up his clothing. But he was still able to make himself meet Grégoire’s eyes, even if he looked terrified by doing it.

Too young. And Mani had been too remote even in his friendliest moment, Marianne too wayward to pay attention to the doings of her own family, James Norrington too sick, and Jean-François _de Morangias_ had been too bitter, so bitter it had disfigured him worse than any lion could have. Sylvia didn’t even need to be mentioned; as always, she was the one who truly knew when to come and to go. Grégoire almost hated her for that.

“I never came close to Jean-François de Morangias,” Grégoire said, voice absurdly light. “Not in that fashion. But he had my wife, his full sister, before I did, and he had my closest friend’s death.”

“I’m not him,” Jean-François replied. He ducked his head and awkwardly peered up through his lashes at Grégoire, almost as if he were worried but didn’t know how to say why. Considering his lack of reason for being worried for Grégoire, that couldn’t be the correct explanation. His hand lifted towards Grégoire, then fell. “I—didn’t mean to say—”

“I’ll take you out. You should do well in Martinique. Now tell me about those men.” Grégoire finished smoothing his clothing, then turned on his heel and walked out. After a short pause, he heard Jean-François follow him. After they’d walked a block, Jean-François began to speak.

* * *

James opened his eyes to the din of a woman furiously cursing through her sobbing. He found Annette kneeling on the floor, holding a few loops of ropes—no, wringing them as if they were chickens headed for the dinnerpot. Occasionally she would stop to bark an order at someone who was shuffling nervously about the hallway…probably the watchmen.

She suddenly noticed that he was awake and her shrilling reached new heights of pain inspiration. His nails were digging into the mattress and his teeth were mashing into each other before he had even fully awakened. “Quiet, please…ah…oh, damn. Ah, what was it…taisez-vous, s’il vous plait.”

Annette blinked very wide, very shallow hazel eyes at him and James felt his frustration winding tight the muscles in his shoulders. But then she smiled and chattered something in a _whisper_ , and the relief he felt was literally overwhelming. He had to put his head back against the pillow and rest for a moment.

The good cheer soon vanished from Annette’s face and she held up the ropes, frowning at him and very slowly and carefully asking him an unintelligible question. When it was clear he didn’t understand, she added gestures pointing to the window, the door, and then she…lifted her hands like a child making a shadow-puppet duck would. Annette pointedly caught James’ eye and mimicked an odd swaying bob—

\-- _Jack_. James sat bolt upright in the bed and seized Annette’s hands. “Jack Sparrow? You’ve seen him—he’s here? He—” she looked confused and about to scream “—rum. Beaucoup de rum. What he smells like. _Rum_.”

From the gist of her pantomime, she’d seen someone that moved like Jack lurking around the house and had sent the watchmen to chase him off. But he’d…done something involving rum, and they’d been lost sight of him. Then they came back and—Annette grabbed fistfuls of the rope and shook them at James, babbling fearfully about Grégoire.

Oh—Beaumont. Beaumont…what was wrong with James’ head? He was having such difficulty remembering…

After a moment, he realized that in fact, he could remember perfectly, but that he was remembering hazy memories. Whereas his mind seemed to be strangely clear, though his throat was still parched and a quick feel at his forehead showed that his fever was steadily burning. His chest and back also hurt, and he certainly hadn’t regained enough strength to be particularly useful for anything. Yet…he felt decidedly better. And he hadn’t been imagining Sparrow.

“ _Norr_ -ington.” Annette seemed on the verge of tears.

“Yes? Oh, please don’t…” James racked his brain, trying to remember the last he’d seen or heard of Beaumont. It had been—no. He’d been hearing two voices. Sparrow had made him drink something, and Beaumont had gone—“Out the window. I mean, la…la fenêtre.”

In a matter of seconds, Annette went from sniffling to up and railing vociferously at the window. She came within a hair of peeling the paint off the sill; James clapped his hands over his ears and tried not to think about how painfully her voice was echoing through his head.

Jack Sparrow was here.

Jack Sparrow was here, and if James’ recollections were correct, Sparrow had been trying to help him. 

Jack Sparrow was here, and James had licked Sparrow’s fingers at some point, and Sparrow had possibly been jealous of Grégoire. It could only be truth, because a novel or a play would be much more clear-cut about whether the plot was a farce or a drama. James pushed his head further into the bedding and attempted to be logical and commonsensical about the situation. Grégoire should be returning shortly, and somehow James had a hunch that he would be bringing Beaumont with him. Sparrow appeared to be acting benevolently, which was less relieving than if he’d been trying to behave like any other pirate. From what James had managed to gather of Will and Elizabeth’s tale, Sparrow preferred to avoid violence but he certainly wasn’t averse to manipulation and coercion as general concepts.

Therefore James first needed to get back to his ship. When Grégoire returned, he should ask the man about what had happened last night, and then he should ask to be taken back to the docks. He did not intend to give up on the werewolf mystery, but he also needed to ensure the safety of his mostly-incapacitated men. And between the werewolves and the pirate, James judged the greater threat to come from Sparrow as far as ships were concerned.

He wondered what Sparrow had fed him. He wondered what he’d said to Sparrow—he couldn’t quite remember all of it. And he wondered why he was so loathe to do what was needed.

Grégoire’s muffled voice rose from the floor below, and James turned around, still not certain as to how he should greet the man.


	7. Red Sunrise

“You may be feeling better, but it’ll only be temporary unless you stay in bed.” Grégoire checked the powder in his pistols, then shoved them back under his coat. He started to gather up his things, but had to stop and reassure Annette when she peeked back in the room, bearing a large package of food.

Behind him stood Beaumont, who had no problem fending off Annette’s hateful looks, but whose hands started to knead the chair back against which he was leaning whenever Grégoire looked in his direction. Once he glanced at James, and the expression on his face was equally divided between bitterness and wistfulness. But neither emotion actually seemed to have much to do with James, considering how Beaumont immediately dropped his eyes towards Grégoire’s boots.

“I know. I’ve seen men with yellow fever before,” James replied, a little irked. He swung his legs off the bed. His head briefly swam with nausea, but it was much weaker than the past few spells had been, and it was not followed by any delusional visions. “And that is why I need to see to my men and ship while I have the chance.”

“You can send a message.” Having dealt with Annette, Grégoire came over to the bed. He had to brush past Beaumont, and he did so in a curiously peremptory fashion. Apparently Beaumont was no longer considered a threat, but it seemed out of character for Grégoire to behave so carelessly. Even when he was walking through a street of strangers, he still remained very aware of his surroundings, but now it was as if he simply didn’t know Beaumont existed. Or he was trying very hard to pretend the man didn’t.

Beaumont flushed and began to take offense, but upon being confronted with Grégoire’s back, his face went through the most extraordinary convolutions. First he was angry, then his lips twisted his expression into contemptuous, and finally he faded to…regretful. He shoved his hands in his pockets and took a step backward before turning around to quietly slip out the door.

“Of course I could send a message. And the Governor might send word that we’re permitted to leave, but we wouldn’t be able to because the captain would be still on shore,” James snapped. His coat was neatly folded over a nearby chair and he reached for it, only to have his hand smacked away by Grégoire.

The other man sat down on the bed, taking James’ wrists in his hands so James couldn’t stand. “Now you’re being ridiculous. What makes you think the Governor will suddenly change his mind? With pirates shepherding werewolves towards him?” He quickly raised two fingers and pressed them against James’ parting lips. “I thought you wanted to know about those.”

James leaned back to free his mouth and tugged his wrists from Grégoire’s grasp. Twisting around to have another try at his coat caused his ribs to protest, but that was actually a welcome pain, since it meant the fever had receded enough for him to differentiate between sensations.

This time, Grégoire let him get his coat. An objection did begin to shape Grégoire’s mouth, but he seemed to have second thoughts and cut it off. While James put on the coat, Grégoire quietly sat and stared at his hands, a small, ironic smile on his face.

The right sleeve went on without any trouble, but when James tried to pull the other one around his back and slip his hand into it, something twisted. At first he thought it was the coat and he fumbled at it, but then he felt a stab in his lower back. James lowered his arms to relieve the strain and consider his options. He was breathing rather hard, he suddenly noticed. And the trembling of his fingers was beginning to turn into spasming.

“How did he get out?” Grégoire asked. He glanced over at James, face halfway between quizzical and amused. But his eyes held a sobriety that cut deep.

“I think…there’s this—I have an acquaintance.” It was not the most honest way of putting it, but at the moment, James did not want to add the walking confusion that was Jack to the mix. “I didn’t realize he frequented New Orléans…he came to visit and I believe he let Beaumont go.”

Grégoire was no fool, and he didn’t spare the truth. But though his eyebrows arched and his tone bespoke disbelief, there was no scorn in him. “He’s a pirate. I thought one of your duties was hunting them.”

“So did I,” James muttered. He began to lift his arms again, then put them back down and turned to fully look at Grégoire.

He’d been afraid that he’d somehow said too much, though three commonplace words shouldn’t have been able to constitute a confession. His instincts, however, were right, for Grégoire was smiling like he was about to be led to the hangman and he’d seen that, after life, death was a poor joke.

When the hand touched James’ cheek, he flinched away. It stayed in place, and after a moment of knowing better, James allowed himself to drift forward. Grégoire let his fingertips smooth along the line of James’ cheek and rest briefly against the tip of James’ eyebrow. Then he raked his fingers across the side of James’ head and pulled them together in an almost savage gesture.

Kissing while sane and aware and kissing while delusional and dizzy actually had little difference, James found. No matter in what state he started, he soon reached the same condition of blurring submergence into sensation.

And then he was ripped back to full consciousness as Grégoire abruptly moved away. The other man reached behind James, then pulled James’ sleeve about and held it while, still startled, James put his arm into it. Then Grégoire helped him with his sword and his few other belongings.

“I can take you as far as an inn on the dock. If you have to leave, your crew can reach you without too much trouble.” Grégoire stood up, then bent down to offer James an arm. “It’ll be within hearing of where I and Jean-François are going as well.”

“I hate sitting about.” James took the arm and pushed himself upwards. He stumbled a little, but managed to right himself without too much trouble. If he went slowly and didn’t tax his strength too much, he should be fine.

Still holding James by the elbow, Grégoire led them to the door. “I can see that. But pushing yourself back into a collapse to reach your ship merely because you can’t help me with the loup-garou isn’t an improvement.”

“I can’t do nothing!” James retorted, trying to make the other man understand by sheer volume of voice. He dug his nails into Grégoire’s arm and stretched out to grab the doorknob, fearful that Grégoire might be changing his mind. “I cannot let—”

“How much are you worrying because of the past and what you didn’t know?” Before James could open the door, Grégoire caught the edge with his fingers. But instead of shutting it, he flung it wide open and dragged them into the hallway. 

Someone gasped and James had the merest glimpse of Beaumont’s startled face before they were hustling down the stairway. His feet were tangling and his knees already wanted to fold in on themselves, but his temper was not lacking for energy. “And who are you to talk about forgetting the past?”

Grégoire paused in his headlong rush and whirled about as if he were going to take James apart into small pieces. He actually yanked so James fell off-balance against him, but the jarring motion seemed to touch something in Grégoire. His pupils widened and snapped narrow, then slowly relaxed to their normal size. After a long, silent moment, Grégoire tipped James back on his feet and stepped away.

“I wondered how he found out.” A tip of the head towards the staircase indicated who Grégoire meant.

James dropped his head, regretting the lapse in judgment. Perhaps he’d been fevered when he’d betrayed Grégoire’s confidences to Beaumont, but that only excused his involvement in Beaumont’s discovery. It did not, however, excuse his own comment. “I…apologize for that.”

“As I said—unhealthy.” Fingers brushed over the back of James’ wrist, making him shiver for reasons that had nothing to do with disease. Then Grégoire wrapped his hand around James’ and pulled him forward. “But you make me wonder,” Grégoire muttered.

Outside was a light two-horse carriage, which Grégoire had apparently hired. In terms of crude monetary compensation, James already owed him so much. And coins did not take into account the way Grégoire helped him into the back, or how Grégoire ignored the tension between him, Beaumont and him as they drove towards the docks. Instead it was light, witty conversation that made James smile, but that didn’t make him laugh too hard so his throat was spared the pain.

He watched from the window as Grégoire paid the innkeeper for the room and the stalls—at this time of evening, they wouldn’t find anyone trustworthy to return it—and he continued watching as Beaumont circled about Grégoire’s side, still uncertain but unable to keep from throwing out a line in hope. The youth appeared to be smitten—no, that was too romantic of a word. Fascinated, then. Understandably.

James sat on the bed, hands folded on his lap, and waited till he could no longer see Grégoire. Then he got up and slipped down to the stables; the stableman had just begun on what appeared to be his nightly bottle and was more than happy to saddle up a horse for James. Doubtless he was relieved to have one less animal to distract him from his rum.

The wig went into the saddlebag with little regret, as it’d already been too battered to be salvageable. His sword he strapped to the saddle, since its weight taxed his strength too much. His coat was folded away with more care, and then James had to stop and catch his breath before he substituted a spare coat that Grégoire had left with him. It was loose and slightly long-sleeved, and it smelled like the other man, and James found himself inhaling deeply as he put it on. His nose also caught the rum fumes drifting from the stableman, and for a moment he was not only lightheaded but also divided.

He rode out to the piers and stared at his ship. She was riding high in the water so he could see she’d need careening soon. If he could collect enough hands to replace the ones lost; he watched for several minutes and the only movement he saw was the bright gleam of gold braid rising and falling—an officer going among the sick lying on the deck. It moved in a jerky, irregular way, as if the man had to fight to stay upright. Then it reached the railing and floated downwards as the man slumped.

James felt his heart climb into his throat and lodge there, pulsing and aching. He opened his mouth to call out—

\--and he shut it, swallowing against the faint trace of nausea that had crept into him. The sails were still properly furled and the failing light glinted off the windows in the bow, so someone was still tending to basic housekeeping duties. All he could do here would be temporary, and would not quiet the nightmares.

He turned the horse around and headed along the docks for the edge of town.

* * *

“He’s not a bad man, your commodore.” Jean-François had on a coat he’d “borrowed” from the closet of Annette’s master, and every few seconds he would shift about in it. The garment had been tailored for a man shorter but broader than him, so the shoulders were only half-filled and the sleeves dangled over his hands into his knotted fists. He shot a look at Grégoire to check Grégoire’s reaction. “Are you going with him afterward?”

“He’s himself, not mine, and you’re more intelligent than that.” They were almost where Grégoire had overheard the pirates last night, which was also where Jean-François said the loup-garou were brought in from the bayou. Or rather, kidnapped, since apparently the loup-garou had an extreme distaste for the city.

The other man shrugged, then had to grab for his coat before it slid off his frame. He tugged the falling side back up before clutching the front closed and hunching beneath the fabric. “Maybe I don’t know how a Parisian acts, since I’ve never met one before.”

“Stop trying to please me,” Grégoire sighed. A strand of hair shook out of his queue and he swept it back with one knuckle. “I already said I’d take you to Martinique.”

“I don’t know anything about Martinique…” For the time of one step, Jean-François swayed in to peer at Grégoire’s face. Then he warily drifted back, nervous eyes flicking everywhere.

Since it was only them, it was foolish to take a direct approach, and indeed, Grégoire had no intention of martyring himself at the altar of the unknown hero. He was neither angry enough nor grief-stricken enough for that; in fact, what best described his mood was most likely depression. It was a dull, detached, numbing feeling, and he frankly couldn’t care about it. So it was easy to ignore his mood and start searching for a likely roof or room in an abandoned house.

Jean-François began to kick at a pebble in the road, but when Grégoire looked at him, he stopped so quickly he nearly tripped. “How far is Martinique? Do you have to sail?”

“Yes. If you want to change your mind, now would be a good time to do so. Once we’re on the ship, we’re going to Martinique and we are not turning back.” A jagged gleam caught Grégoire’s eye and he looked up to see the upper room of what had once been a cozy, respectable two-story house. But now the front door was missing and rats peeked down from the balcony, which had a huge jagged hole that ate across into the side of a nearby window for an entrance.

He ducked into the first floor, saw nothing, and continued on to where the staircase should have been. It was predictably missing, but there was an old ladder leaning against one wall. Grégoire took it and propped it against the hole in the ceiling, then tried a few of the rungs. They held.

“I’m not changing my mind,” Jean-François said, so fervent that he couldn’t have been lying. He scrambled after Grégoire and nearly broke the ladder with the added stress he put on it. “I’m not. But—what are you doing? Are you staying in Martinique? Oh—there’s where they land.”

Jean-François pointed at a small strip of beach about a hundred yards from the house’s back. It was partly shaded by a drunken snarl of a shack and a few scrubby bushes, but otherwise Grégoire had a clear shot. 

He walked back into the room and knelt down, unslinging his rifle from his back. Then he spread out a rag on the floor and set his powderhorn and bullets on it. “No. Get down so you can’t be seen from the road.”

“Then where are you going?” The other man obligingly bounced back into the darkness of the house and also squatted down, watching as Grégoire picked among his bullets. He flicked out a finger and rolled one towards him. “That’s the best one.”

Grégoire looked down at the hand he was using to hold the rifle and found it, as he’d expected, white from the force of his grip. He willed it to relax and didn’t breathe till he saw the color bleeding back into it. “All you asked was to be taken out of the city. That’s what I’ll do.”

“Are you still confusing me with him?” Jean-François abruptly dropped back and sat, pulling his knees up to his chest. His temper was showing in the red streaking down from his cheekbones and the hard jittery glint in his eyes. “I’m _not_.”

“It doesn’t matter whether you are or you aren’t.” The bullet Jean-François had selected was indeed the best of the lot, but Grégoire perversely went through them all one last time before he picked it up. He began to load the rifle, but the rising irritation in him made him stop and look hard at Jean-François. “The alley had about as much to do with you as God does with shit.”

Though he flinched, Jean-François didn’t hesitate. “I know plenty of priests that would say God is just as responsible for the creation of shit as he is for the creation of heaven.”

“Priests,” Grégoire snorted. He loaded the rifle with short, efficient, exasperated movements of his hands and set it aside. Then he laid his hands on the dirty floor and bowed his head, trying to remember what was necessary and what was not. “This isn’t a bargain you can make. Do you realize why I’d be taking you along, if I did?”

He waited for an answer, but a quick one failed to come. The moments dragged on, eating away at the air as a fever did at a weak body, exposing angles of bones and thinning out skin till nothing remained but the bright, bright eyes.

At last Grégoire had to look up; Jean-François was still staring at him, stone-faced and bitter-eyed. Their gazes only met for an instant before the other man glanced down at his wrists, which were very red and very raw. “I realize more than you give me credit. He’s a gentleman, your Norrington, but he isn’t for you, is he?” Jean-François shrugged and dropped his hands out of sight. “And I’m not thinking you are for me, but I want to leave because here I’m stuck and I’ll just rot, not because it’s New Orléans. You rot the same no matter what the city.”

“You’re still a fool,” Grégoire sighed. Then he sat up and listened, for there was a faint low splashing coming near, and he suspected that it was the pirates.

A thin mist was collecting on the surface of the water, so he heard the noise separate into oars and cursing voices and muffled growling long before the pirogue hove into view. He pushed up till he was balanced on fingertips and toes, one hand arched over the rifle, and squinted at the boat.

In the middle was a thrashing gray thing half-covered with tarps, which had to be the loup-garou. Occasionally a white tooth would flash and one of the pirates unfortunate enough to be seated beside it would cry out, only to be loudly and abusively shushed by the pilot. The man at the rudder was the drawling Creole Grégoire had seen last night.

The boat slipped forward onto the sand for a good ways before it started to slow and crunch, so it was a singularly shallow-bottomed affair. As soon as the first grinding noise arose, pirates started leaping ashore and grabbed at the oarlocks to yank the pirogue fully onto the shore. Grégoire quietly edged out onto the balcony and pulled up his rifle. He slotted it between two railings and took aim for the loup-garou.

A hand grabbed his shoulder. Jean-François glowered back Grégoire’s silent snarl and jerked his chin at the road below. Coming down it was the Irishman. “Hurry up, hurry up,” he called out. “Goddamned Ulloa’s gotten panicky, and something don’t feel right.”

“You want hurry, you help with this.” The Creole suddenly seized the loup-garou by its throat chain and heaved it out of the boat. It flopped heavily, spraying sand about, and then staggered up to spot the Irishman, whereupon it promptly tried to lunge. The pirates were somewhat slow about dragging back on the chains.

“Christ Jesus! You goddamn son of a whore—” The Irishman scrambled backwards and fell against a tall stack of broken crates, panting. “I should cut off your fucking bollocks for that.”

Arguing leaders was an opportunity that Grégoire was not about to miss. He lifted the rifle and aimed for the loup-garou again. He was pulling back the trigger when he remembered the yellow eye of the lion rolling up to beg him; Grégoire abruptly shifted aim and snapped back the trigger.

The Creole jerked, then slumped backward and fell in a crumple. He wasn’t quite dead—his legs were kicking, but his crew assumed the worst and they swarmed the Irishman, waving about pistols and cutlasses. He took a shot in the arm, but managed to down two of the crew and make it to the cover of a doorway. The other three pirates immediately dove behind piles of debris.

They’d run out of bullets soon enough and would be going at each other with swords, so it was best that Grégoire got down to the road and made sure they all died. He hastily gathered his things and turned to the ladder, only to see Jean-François’ head disappearing. A swift check revealed that Grégoire was missing a pistol.

Despite his annoyance, he had to admit he was impressed with the smoothness of the theft. He hurried down the ladder and slipped out into the street, heading for the shoreline. Jean-François was moving towards the other end of the shooting, but if he’d survived this long in New Orléans, he should know how to use that pistol.

The loup-garou had been left unattended, but it was so heavily chained that it couldn’t do much more than drag itself along. When it saw Grégoire, it instantly started whipping itself about, turning the lead-chains into dangerous whirling weights. He ducked one and didn’t quite another; it bashed into his arm and he only caught it by sheer force of will, for his muscles had gone numb. Then they burned, but he ignored that and yanked at the chain, trying to see how the beast was bound. No manacles—it seemed that the pirates had taken a few long chains and locked them together wherever they crossed.

Grégoire had his pistol in his hand and when he saw a chance, he shot it at one of the locks. It cracked off, but a red spray went with it, so it hadn’t been a clean shot. The loup-garou abruptly stilled, staring at Grégoire as he shoved his pistol back in his belt. There was reason in its eyes, albeit a savage blurred kind.

“Grégoire!” Jean-François shouted.

He looked up and the other man gestured wildly back at him. A dead pirate was at Jean-François’ feet, the Irishman was slumping against the doorframe with eyes rolled back…a gleam caught Grégoire’s eye and he threw himself aside just in time to avoid the pirate’s charge. His knives flowed into his hand and he crossed them to block the next blow. Scissored them outward to throw the other man back, then lunged forward past the pirate’s guard. His left blade went into the gut and grated on bone; hot thick fluid splashed his front and quickly chilled.

The dying man made one last try, but Grégoire easily beat down the wild swing and swung him out of the way, letting the pirate’s own weight take him off Grégoire’s knife. A glance back at Jean-François saw him ably dealing with the last pirate. Rolling the tension out of his shoulders, Grégoire turned back towards the loup-garou.

The Creole had heaved himself around to face it, and he was flinging a handful of some powder at its face. Its eyes went wide and then the reason vanished, the fury rose, and Grégoire threw himself towards Jean-François. “Back! Back!”

He didn’t have any loaded pistols left and he knew knives alone wouldn’t stop it in time. His hand flailed back, hit a shoulder and he yanked Jean-François towards the house; if they made it to the second floor, that might delay the beast long enough for him to reload.

But his feet also caught something and he stumbled. Instead of running like a sensible man, Jean-François grabbed for him.

The loup-garou covered the space in two bounds. It rose on the third—

\--and a flung sword took it in the throat. The beast dropped, gargling and spitting blood. Its knees crumpled and it fell onto its forelegs, but then it was up again and turning toward a pale, pale James trying desperately to control his rearing horse. Grégoire was already moving when he cursed the man’s stupidity, lunging for the Irishman’s corpse. One of his knives clattered out of his sleeve, but he had to let it go because there wasn’t time.

He ripped open the Irishman’s coat and felt about, positive that a man such as him would carry more than the gentleman’s two pistols. And it was there, an oblong heavy weight in the tail of his coat. But when Grégoire pulled it out, he saw that the bullet wouldn’t be large enough to take down the loup-garou.

It would have to do. He spun around and shot, knocking the beast aside just as its teeth were sink into the flanks of James’ horse. The stallion screamed its fear and danced aside, giving Grégoire a perfect view of the pain-maddened loup-garou, with James’ sword in its neck and…and Grégoire’s knife in its ribs. Jean-François met his gaze with a terrified face, but pointed towards the Creole, who’d finally died. “He didn’t fire his pistol!”

But the loup-garou was between Grégoire and the Creole.

And then it was not about the beast, because James suddenly made a hoarse, strangled cry and did not balance with his horse’s next wild buck. He was scrabbling for a handhold even as he fell off, but he found none.

Something whooshed past Grégoire’s head. A hoof, and that was when he realized he’d run up beneath James. He grabbed an arm floating in the air, clawed his hand beneath it and yanked just as the stallion struck out at the menacing loup-garou with its front hooves. James rose and was nearly wrenched out of Grégoire’s grip, but Grégoire held on and something snapped. The release of strain threw him back and the other man came with him, trailing a broken stirrup.

“The loup-garou—” Jean-François faltered, then ran across the road and stood beside Grégoire. A bare yard away, one pulped socket eyelessly glared at them, while the rest of the loup-garou’s bulk stretched over the dirt. It had become the maimed body of a swarthy, stocky man and Grégoire mouthed a silent prayer for him, forgetting that he no longer believed.

The stallion screamed a last time before kicking its heels and taking off. Through the dust cloud it’d stirred up came swaying the man Grégoire had met on the roof. He stopped short of the loup-garou’s corpse and made a quick bow to Jean-François, who was awkwardly holding a cutlass he’d apparently just seized. “Beaumont. If you’d be seeing Madame Cecile and her hoodoo woman any time soon, please pass ‘em my regards. And Anamaria’s to Grace.”

James murmured incoherently into Grégoire’s shoulder, limp as a rag. When Grégoire touched the man’s forehead, he found it burning hot, and he could already feel the sweats starting to slick James’ skin. The damnable man had plunged himself right back into the fever.

“Is he ill again?” Without so much as a by-your-leave, the pirate sidled up to James’ other side and felt at the pulse in his neck. “Damn. She said it’d last longer than that…’course, he would go runnin’ around with rougarou and Frenchmen instead of resting.”

“What? What did you give him? And who are—” Grégoire stopped and stared, remembering what James had said, and the name he’d called out while they were waiting to see the madam. “Jack Sparrow.”

The man winced. “ _Captain_ Jack Sparrow. Can tell Norrington’s the one who told you about me. Now, how about we go somewhere a little less…bloody?”

* * *

James woke in a damp tangle of sheets and pillows, a hard but rocking floor beneath him and the smell of salt tanging his nose. He squeezed his eyelids together and blew hard through his nose. “I am not going to hallucinate,” he told himself.

Then he opened his eyes and saw his cabin. And Grégoire, sitting beside his pallet and reading a well-worn book. When James gasped, the other man put down his book and had a hand to James’ forehead before he could blink. Grégoire ran his fingers down to James’ throat and felt his pulse, stroked them over his cheeks and across his lips, and all the while, the man stared at James as if he’d been resurrected.

“You’ve been unconscious for nearly a week,” Grégoire finally said. He started to lift his hands from James.

It took about all the strength James had, but he caught Grégoire’s hands and folded them within his own. “What happened?” he whispered.

“The loup-garou’s dead, and so are the pirates that were smuggling them in. They were…one of them was on the governor’s staff, and he was angling to have his own private city, with the help of local backing.” The other man gently pulled one of his hands loose, but let James continue to have the other one while he poured some water. Then Grégoire lifted James’ head and held the glass to his lips. “We still didn’t save the governor, so I hope you weren’t trying to do that. The morning after, the whole city rose against him and drove him out.”

“I never particularly cared for Ulloa, except for his hold over this ship.” James swallowed another mouthful of water and let it scrape away some of the searing dryness in his throat. He tried to tip the glass for more, but his hands were once again shaking and he couldn’t. But Grégoire could and did. When James was done, he made sure to murmur a thanks, however inadequate words really were.

Then he cocked his head to listen, because through the door came faint shouts that sounded like working sailors. It had only been a week. There was no way that his crew could have recovered so quickly, even with the best treatment in the world.

“We’re about to dock at Martinique, as I do not think I or Jean-François would be welcome in a British outpost. And no, don’t offer—I need to collect my next fee from the French government anyway.” Grégoire put the glass away and sat back, brushing his free hand over James’ hair. It felt as if it’d grown too long for a wig to sit comfortably on it. But it had been a long time since he had had hair long enough for stroking, and somehow he was loathe to think about cutting it back. “Your…ship is being sailed by pirates. No, “commandeered” was the word he used.”

James suddenly felt as if he should be hitting his head against the floor. Or he should be trying to sit upright, but he had neither the strength nor the will for either. “ _Sparrow_ is sailing _my_ ship?”

“No, a woman is. Anamaria.” Awe and irritation briefly mixed in Grégoire’s eyes. “She says she’ll take you to just outside Port Royal and then she and her crew will leave you to let yourselves in, as she phrased it. By then it should be safe for you to enter port.”

Outside someone shouted, and this time James could make out the words. From somewhere came the strength to propel him up on his elbows; he threw an arm over Grégoire’s neck before his muscles could fail him, but he was too late in the case of his tongue. “I—I want to thank you. You are—you have been one of the most generous men I’ve had the pleasure to—oh, damn it. Everything I say will be too cold and empty and small.”

So he kissed Grégoire instead, and he drowned in it. Then, slowly and reluctantly, he pulled himself back up and broke surface. Opened his eyes to see Grégoire watching him with a sad but warm gaze.

Grégoire looked down and tugged James’ hand up to his lips. He branded an impress of his mouth into the back, then rubbed it with his cheek. “This isn’t like the loup-garou, or like the dead-not-dead pirates you spoke of.”

“And I don’t want an explanation for this.” What James wanted was, somehow, for reason to win him through, but it was precisely reason that was keeping him back. He leaned so he could rest his cheek against Grégoire’s, and then when Grégoire replaced that with his hand, James turned into the touch for as long as he could. “There’s something Eliz—a friend of mine says: take what you can, and give nothing back.”

Careful as a mother with her firstborn, Grégoire recradled James in the blankets. “You can’t take this,” he told James. And he was right. “But you’ll be happy. You’re a commodore and a gentleman yourself, and you’re a man who has seen too much to not be wise. You’ll be happy without me.”

“I think you will, too,” James admitted. But there were shades of happiness, and one of them made him grab Grégoire’s hand for a last time. “If you’re right, then I must be as well.”

Or they were both wrong.

It was a cruel thought, and it didn’t stand up under the pressure of the light kiss Grégoire left on James’ brow. Then Grégoire stood up and quietly walked out of the cabin, leaving the room smaller and darker and more crowded with shadows than James remembered it being. He shuddered into the sheets and closed his eyes, trying to dream of blue skies and parrot-men. And he did, and all of his dreams looked like sketches done in a familiar hand.


	8. Epilogue 1: Summer Song

“I thought you might have a way in.” The figure in the doorway was appallingly thin, though the cut of his clothes disguised it well. Only when Norrington’s coat hung open, as it did now because he had put his hand up against the lintel, was the toll of the fever’s passing visible.

He ducked inside and nodded to Will, who’d frozen by the anvil, but mainly faced Jack. In his other hand was what looked very much like a bottle of expensive rum wrapped in brown paper, and in his eyes was a request.

Jack fingered the hilt of his sword for a moment longer, then grinned. Why not? His curiosity had been eating him something fierce ever since he’d watched Anamaria sail off a proud ship of the Navy. And it hadn’t been as if she’d sweetened up enough to talk about more than the weather and the minor sailing details of that journey. “Be back in a bit, Will. You think it’ll be done by then?”

“What?” The other man startled to attention, eyes shooting rapidly back and forth between Norrington and Jack. He opened his mouth as if to object, and then insisted on glaring questioningly at Jack’s quieting look. But marriage must’ve been knocking some sense into him, for he pressed his fist against his mouth and nodded. “The blade will. The hilt will take till tomorrow.”

“Ah, well, I expect I’ve time. Nothing stirring round here.” Jack clapped a hand to Will’s shoulder before stepping outside.

The governor had a lovely back lawn, as carefully manicured and sculpted as the wig that was missing from Norrington’s head. His hair, now long enough to flop a few bangs from beneath his hat, was a rich chestnut color that contrasted starkly with his chalky complexion. The skin over his cheekbones was pulled tight so the fine worry-lines around his eyes and mouth were not gentle wrinkles, but sharp incisions. But for a recovering victim of yellow fever, he looked remarkably well.

“That French acquaintance of yours isn’t bad with a blade,” Jack said. He looked from the grim face done to the more potentially cheerful bundle in Norrington’s hand. “Chipped a good notch out of mine, and—”

“—of course it’d be from Will’s forge.” Norrington glanced over his shoulder at the new attachment to the mansion, then turned away down a gravel path. He half-lifted his hand and gestured for Jack to come along. “I still have a few doubts about the wisdom of what he and Elizabeth are doing, but it seems that they’ve managed most of the hurdles.”

As they went along, Norrington reached into his coat and pulled out a thick packet of paper, which was sealed with red wax and stamped with the governor’s ring. When Jack tilted it into the light, he could faintly see something of another seal inside; he carefully slid his nail beneath the first one, lifted it and peeked. Well, that was _very_ interesting.

“In Versailles it’s possible to earn a title merely by having the ability to craft a becoming wig, or by scientifically cataloguing all the native birds of the country. I suppose Britain is trying to catch up with the rest of the world.” The half-smile on Norrington’s face was not entirely sarcastic. He sighed, dreaming of something, and then shook himself back to his usual practical demeanor. “It’s to find out things and make discoveries, not to start a war. Please try to remember that, if only for the sake of my possible successor’s sanity.”

“They’d not be fool enough to replace you. It takes forever to learn a little of the Caribbean’s ways, let alone know it like you do.” The amount of pessimism in Norrington’s voice was enough to distract Jack from the promise of rum and bend a sharp look on the other man.

But Norrington merely shrugged it off and continued walking. “I’ve been ill for a considerable time, and previous to that, I put my ship in danger of being taken by Ulloa. They’re reviewing my case, and I personally am grateful that they’ve been that lenient.”

They ended at the edge of a cliff, backs sheltered by a thick stand of foliage and fronts exposed not to any straggling pieces of town, but to the brisk air and great stretch of shimmering blue. Norrington spent a second longing for the wave-ride before he laughed to himself, took off his hat, and sat down. He unwrapped the bottle, which was indeed rum, and passed it to Jack.

It was fine stuff, burning not in a wide clumsy swath but in delicate tendrils that weaved through Jack’s mouth and nose and hooked into his mind. He squatted on the ground besides James and simply appreciated. The other man remained quiet, though James was by no means bored; his fingers twitched and played restlessly in the lace trailing from his cuffs.

“You did tell them, whoever this “they” might be, that there were extenuating circumstances that did interfere in wholly unpredictable and unrefusable ways?” Jack lowered the bottle to admire the amber color of it, then swiped a thumb over the rim. He recorked it and nestled it firmly in a tuft of grass. Much as he wanted to make further acquaintance with such fine stock, he had other matters to attend to first.

“If you’re referring to the werewolves, no. I did try to explain the commandeering of my ship, but curiously, my officers insisted that we sailed back to Port Royal without needing to…hire…any extra hands,” James snorted. He looked as he had amusement, humiliation and gratitude all lined up in a row before him, and him with only one bullet in his pistol. “I finally had to acquiesce to the opinion that I was hallucinating.”

It was funny how he didn’t seem to have a problem tossing the wolves out of the story—doubtful that he’d kept in the Frenchmen, either--but insisted on keeping Jack in it. Or maybe it was flattering, if Jack looked slantwise at it. Which was usually his preferred line of sight, but occasionally he acknowledged the need to stare straight on.

A stray lock of hair fell into James’ face. He lifted a hand to sweep it back, then turned to catch Jack staring. James shrugged and dropped his hand to the ground between them. “I find that many things I used to think necessary aren’t. At least, not out here.” He was still looking at Jack, face very calm and composed. “I believe you promised to tell me a story. I don’t think I hallucinated that.”

No, he hadn’t, and nowadays Jack generally tried to reduce the number of things he broke. So he sat back and let the story just roll off his tongue. Halfway through his voice went a bit dry and he opened up the rum again, let its liquid burn scratch out the pictures in the air. He paused a few times, trying to decide whether Will and Elizabeth might have a bit of upset if he revealed that bit, and sometimes he chose to be loyal. Sometimes he chose to be truthful—it all depended on the occasion, after all. In a handful of places he threw in a touch of confession, since he figured James could understand it.

James listened very carefully and closely; if he didn’t quite follow something, he interrupted and asked for clarification. Occasionally he lost his temper a bit with what he perceived as Jack’s idiosyncratic method of narration, but as the story unfolded, he started to see the reason behind it. And when Jack was done, James nodded once and thanked Jack in a voice that would probably trade for its weight in gold. “I appreciate it. I’ve never managed to discuss it with Will or Elizabeth.”

“Well, it’s likely the first bout they’ve had with the nasties that walk after dark. Can’t blame them, really.” Jack offered the last mouthful of rum to James, was refused, and swallowed it himself. He hefted it and eyed a small rock far below the cliff, but before he’d even finished estimating, James pointedly took the bottle from him. “Most like to think it’s just a one-time run of bad luck. And usually it is, so no point in thinking more on nature’s unnatural children.”

The other man set the bottle on his other side, probably meaning to take it back with him and properly dispose of it. Then he turned around and stared hard at Jack. “Why did you help me?”

“Well, that’s a question.” There really should’ve been a little more rum—just enough to haze the sky into a pleasant dusk-tinged memory, and possibly some sherry if James couldn’t be induced to try the best thing man had ever invented. Too sober meant too many questions, because Jack had his little nagging gaps as well. He’d spoken with Grégoire, of course, but that man could put on a smoothness that a windless sea couldn’t match. And Jean-François wasn’t much more than a boy whose style Jack had happened to take enough of a liking to that he felt like doing him a favor, so no point in asking him.

“Sentences with the word ‘why’ usually are,” James muttered, twisting his fingers into the ground. Then he flattened his hand so it spread across the space and just grazed Jack’s hand. His eyes looked into Jack’s head and looked past it at the same time, as if Jack were seeing two men.

But it was only one that rose to meet him when Jack straightened, dipped to his knees and leaned over James. His mouth brushed along James’ cheek and circled into his collar, which was not quite as stiff as it looked. He slid his fingers beneath it and eased James’ coat to the ground; when fingers slipped into the folds of his own, he shrugged it off and laid it down. James finally laughed, half-offended as he should be, and he began to say something about not being made of china. Which was all very well and true, and he’d probably been getting his fill of it, but Jack couldn’t help what he saw.

The deep pallor of James’ skin pervaded his whole body, which was all hipbones jagging into Jack’s palms and rib-lines an upturned hull straining through thin skin. James’ breath went ragged a beat before the rise of his prick against Jack’s thigh and the urgency of his hands on Jack’s back said it should, and there was still a deep harsh note marring the moans that parted his lips. But the tang of the ocean air had washed color back into his eyes, and when Jack laid his cheek against James’ chest, passed his hands over thighs and sides and arms, pressed his mouth hard, there was also color rising from deep within the man to stain health back into his skin.

He clutched at Jack, gave over his mouth and his body, and in return Jack found himself giving up parts of himself he hadn’t even remembered having. Baubles and glistening bubbles, gold-edged sights and blood-rusted voices rose from the deeps and danced before Jack’s eyes. And if James were looking properly, he could have seen them as well. He could have seen the answer to his question as it floated up from its broken-locked chest.

When James finally surrendered to their joining, he suddenly pressed his mouth hard to the point of Jack’s shoulder. And he kept his lips there, muffling low groaning sounds while the rest of him slowly relaxed, while Jack chased his lost pieces and grappled his way to break surface.

At last James let his head fall back, but he rested only for a second before he was sitting up, pulling at his clothes. “I only said I’d be gone for two hours; I’m late by at least that much.”

Jack didn’t exactly have a strict schedule to keep, though doubtless Anamaria was edging onto nervous by now, and he tried to keep her as calm as possible. He really should get her a boat. Ship. Later he’d think on it, but for the moment he’d watch James dress and possibly touch that soft-looking skin on the inside of the man’s wrist.

James finished straightening his coat and bent to pick up the bottle, which was when Jack’s hand finally couldn’t resist any longer. The other man’s breath caught a bit and he stared at the fingers wrapped around his wrist. Then he smiled, though it looked as if he’d rather sigh. “I’ll bring another one.”

“Will you. Then bring a bit for yourself, too. It might help. ” Not that Jack doubted James’ word, mind. He didn’t quite understand what was going through the other man’s head, but he wasn’t about to refuse anything offered. It wasn’t in his nature.

Though once in a great while he disliked always having to take what he _could_.

“I can’t fathom you,” James abruptly said. He pulled his hand and the bottle out of Jack’s grip, but then he stayed to rest his fingers on Jack’s shoulder. His head leaned in, but at the last moment it dropped. Then it lifted, and James was looking at Jack, asking and pleading and almost but not entirely there. “I’d like to. I’d like to have more than one conversation with you where I don’t mistake you for a hallucination.”

What he was really saying was what he could give, and whether Jack was going to ask for something beyond that. But they probably both already knew the answer to that. “Always willing to chat, commodore. Just as long as we’re not doing it with cannons.”

It wasn’t precisely what Jack had been wanting, really, but it was something he could work with. And he could be patient. A few days and a few loup-garoux couldn’t be much compared to nine years and an Aztec curse.

But still, once James had finally taken his leave, Jack lingered a little while longer by the cliff’s edge. He wondered whether it would be worth reaching for that bit more.

He’d better return; he’d probably be needing his sword.


	9. Epilogue 2: Embers

The fire burned low, its light turning redder and redder. It gathered on the far wall and stuffed the fresh skins hanging there with scarlet, as if they were sacred relics perpetually bleeding. Grégoire didn’t cross himself.

It was a small house, little more than two rooms divided between the horses and him and Jean-François, who was sleeping on a cot by Grégoire’s feet. In the lurid light, the other man lost years and shaded fragile like a glass bubble. His fingers that curled on the mattress seemed too delicate to be touched, though only an hour ago they had felt like iron-toothed traps on Grégoire’s shoulders.

Now he rubbed at his shoulder, remembering a different grip. Doubtless James was well-recovered and sinking back into his old life, with the possible addition of that pirate. Sparrow had been…an interesting conversation-partner, and if Grégoire hadn’t already had too much on his hands, he might have considered something. If Grégoire had met Sparrow first, he wouldn’t have had too much on his hands—it would have been careless and delightful and utterly without higher meaning.

It was a shame, he told himself. He knelt back down and laid his hand on Jean-François’ shoulder, lightly stroking the red-dappled skin of his own rogue. And he almost believed himself.


End file.
